Nice bod, rainbow pants.

Okay, I was prepared to hate that (ex-Irish step dancer, got a lot of crap about "Riverdancing" and whether I luuuuved Michael Flatley...it's a little like making fun of the emo kids) but it was actually pretty damn funny.

Also, and this is kind of an odd observation, but DAMN technique has gotten more precise/showier/tougher since '94 (watching the clips from Riverdance).

Fuzzbean: Got a current example to show us, via the power of YouTube?

This is a pretty decent video. It's from last year's Western Regional Championships. Around 2:10 it starts getting interesting--at a purely technical level legs are more crossed, hyperextended, higher on toes etc, but there's also way more explosively speedy leaps (jumps where you swap legs two or three times in the air before landing). The girl who starts at 2:10 does a lot of these, which just didn't exist fifteen years ago (or even 7 years ago when I started).

This is also a pretty good example of both boys' and girls' champion-level dancing. Again, higher, more crossed, faster, flickier.

Granted there is a big difference between dancing for a show and doing a competition solo, but it's still pretty cool to watch.

For comparison's sake, here's a reasonably old video (has to be from 1996 or thereabouts). Same level of competition, same dance (reel)--at least before 1:20. They're way lower on their toes, less crossed, and overall feel slower/more grounded. Their leaps are also way slower and less sharp.

/geekery.

Um, yeah. And I was never anywhere near this good.

Also, I need to excise "way" from my descriptive vocabulary. Somebody flog me with a noodle.

*helpfully runs after fuzzy with a noodle*

It's amazing the kind of air they're getting in the recent vids, even those younger kids. It's pretty cool.

I also feel compelled to mention that after I took my WMP off of pause because I'd wanted to see/watch the dancing, I realized it was playing this song: The Fenians - Casey's Jig

I don't know jack about step dance, but this discussion is very interesting to me (and the physicality of the dancers is really impressive). Kinda relatedly, please enjoy these two breakdancing clips:

The Rock Steady Crew in Flashdance, 1983
Final battle at Scribble Jam, 2006

Yeah, but fuzzbean, the first is hard shoe, the second is soft. IIRC, hasn't hard shoe always been a bit more showy? (never did it myself, though they did have practice at the irish center before the céilí and I liked to get there early to watch. It's really impressive! I wish my mom had put me in that instead of tap)

Hey, kelly, before I answer: by "first" do you mean the clip from "Riverdance"?

Hmm, no kelly with clarification. Anyway: the three videos I linked are a pretty solid apples-to-apples comparison from ten years ago and now. The dancers are at the same level (champion), same age (obviously except for the titchy ones in the first link), and doing the same dance (although different steps--there are seven dances in different time signatures, and every school has its own steps for each of them). You can still see the technical differences between then and now.

RE: Hard shoe vs. soft. Hard shoe is usually done for the big show pieces because, hey, NOISE. And when you have >10 people up on stage all making NOISE together that's pretty badass. The level of difficulty has still increased pretty substantially, but you won't see this in a show, because you want all the people making NOISE to make NOISE together and you don't want to introduce too much room for error.

The technical stuff for hardshoe for competition has gotten harder. When I started dancing (1996ish) it was totally acceptable to have your feet turned out so that, standing flat, your right toe was in line with your left heel and vice versa (ballet fifth position). Standing on your toes, it was fine to have your feet in a straight line under you, maybe a smidge over-crossed so you could see both heels. When I tried to take it up again (2005ish), standing flat you needed to have your feet overcrossed by at least an inch or two and on your toes, to be able to see between your feet. (This particular point applies to hard and soft shoe, actually.)

Hardshoe also now incorporates a lot more flicky super-jumps, hitting your heels together 2-3 times in the air, etc. It's gotten a lot more acrobatic. It's hard to find a video for this because you'll mostly see this style in competition, and you're uniformly not allowed to take videos of competition (steps are proprietary--they belong to the school/teacher that created them and there're always concerns about step-poachers. No, I'm not kidding.)

So...yeah. More geekery. Maybe I should turn this into a FPP.