Irish Step Dancing, Cultural Heritage And Education

The Irish tap dance has transformed folk dance into commercial performance successfully. The Irish tap dance has been sweeping the whole world. The classical Riverdance becomes the steady winner at the box office, and has broken the record many times in Europe, USA and Canada. In 1997, it was awarded the Best Musical in Grammy, and was performed in the same year's Academy Award. As a dance educator, I want to enrich the literature research to the education problems of foreign outstanding non-material cultural heritage through the research to the Irish tap dance inheritance and education, and inspire the cultural inheritance and education of our folk dance.China is an ancient country with an old-line civilization, has not only the massive material cultural heritage, but also abundant non-material cultural heritage. There are totally 10 kinds in the name list of the first batch of state-level non-material cultural heritage, and the 3rd kind among them is the protection of the folk dance. But along with the enhancement of globalization tendency and the sharp change of economy and society, the survival, protection and development of non-material cultural heritage has encountered many new questions and faced a severe situation. As one of the non-material cultural heritage, the Tibetan tap dance is also facing the stern modern inheritance crisis. Whether our ancient Tibetan tap dance could go out of the country to the world, the success of Irish tap dance may give us some new clew and ponder.This paper constructs the main body frame through the angle of cultural inheritance, emphasized particularly on applying the research of education anthropology that the effect of culture to human's development, and advocates promoting the human's development through folk culture's inheritance and education. At the same time, applying to the similar comparison method, this paper carries on a comparison to the Irish tap dance and our Tibetan tap dance, which causes us have a deeper understanding to their cultural inheritance and education, and inspires our folk art's cultural inheritance and education. This paper is divided into five parts as follows: The first part summarizes the basic situation of the Irish tap dance, mainly describes the origin, development and evolution process of the Irish tap dance. The second part discusses the beneficial influence of the Irish tap dance to human's intelligence development based on the multi-dimensional intelligence theory of Howard Gardner. The third part takes Riverdance as an example, carries on the research to the cultural inheritance of the Irish tap dance. The last part compared the Irish tap dance and our Tibetan tap dance in nationality, artistry and their inheritance mode and development pattern, thus discovers respective superiority and inferiority in inheritance and education, and inspires our folk art's cultural inheritance and education.