Trinity Irish Dance Company.

Almost every traditional Irish step dancer is a furtive patriot who offers a mockingly demure, seemingly subservient front--then gleefully flouts it. Symbolically, step dancing celebrates extremes while half trying to hide this. As part of the disguise, the dancer stands unmercifully erect throughout the performance, as if prepared for military maneuvers or parodying a bygone ideal of civic decorum. The body is as vertical as geometry from the ankles up the face blandly basks in a childlike willingness to obey, and the arms are held near the body, oddly deprived of motive and the power inherent in motion.

Yet close to the ground, where the partial gaze of a British soldier would least tend to wander, the Irish keep land raffishly reveal, when the way is clear) their secret: the dissenting rhythms of pell-mell, manic, liberating footwork, like tap dancers turned contrarian and fanatic. They are not a subject people then. The furious speed and force of the feet's musical attack provide an unlikely and incorrigible motor for the imagery of virtue on top. Their virtuosity depends on a kind of duplicity to triumph. The drama of the dance shows defiance rewarded.

Michael Flatley was a dancer of this demonic sort when he was performing as a relative unknown ten years ago in Chicago. But times have changed for step dancing in this country, and Flatleys contributions to Riverdance and his own Lord of the Dance have brought a Barnum-like exuberant commercialism to the art, translating what was Irish into American. Boyish back-room rhythmic rivalries with political overtones have yielded to opulently escapist floor shows. [See "Celtic Crossovers," October].

Leaning more toward Flatley's style than to the old world's is the Trinity Irish Dance Company of Chicago, directed by Mark Howard. Its New York debut came wrapped in modest American theatrical stardust (kitschy smoke in gobs, coy lighting, slit skirts, neon unitards) and mobbed the Joyce's stage with steadfastly sanitary all-girl Rockette-like unison numbers, innocuously choreographed or co-choreographed by Howard. Except for brief appearances by the brilliant Darren Smith, a 1997 world Irish dancing champion, technique on this long program of ten generically ethnic-mythic pieces wasn't the point. Despite the clarity of its footwork, the corps of girl goddesses seemed meant to serve merely as happy Celtic bodies in garish outfits.

They tapped, spun, grinned, and changed costumes for dances that ranged from straightforward baubles (Step About, 1991) to confused melodramas (the premieres Bansidhe and The Mollies). Then, at concert's end, Howard sent them smiling in their glad rags to the Joyce's doors on Eighth Avenue, where they thanked departing theatergoers for coming. Maybe show biz is the only American politics.