Feeling Impact

What does it mean to feel impact in dance?

In Feeling Impact: A Timedancer's Study of Irish Step Dance, Dr Russell Patrick Brown reimagines Irish step dance through the felt intelligence of the body. Moving beyond the dazzling speed of footwork and the familiar sound of hard shoes striking the floor, this groundbreaking study explores how dancers experience impact as vibration, resonance, pressure and even pain-and how those sensations carry memory, identity and history.

Drawing on practice-based research, queer and disabled embodiment, and comparative work with Flamenco, Tap and Ballet Folklórico, Brown develops a radical new framework for understanding Irish step dance as an embodied archive. Here, impact is not only technique or spectacle: it is a language of survival, a rhythm of resistance and a politics of feeling.

Two original performance case studies, The Querist (2017) and AngelAI (2023), illustrate this impact-driven approach in motion, while personal reflections from Brown's position as a queer, Romani, disabled artist-scholar illuminate the intersections of race, ability and cultural identity within global dance practice.

Written in vivid, accessible prose, "Feeling Impact" expands the conversation on Irish step dance, percussive forms, and decolonial performance. For dancers, choreographers, scholars, and anyone drawn to the somatic or spiritual dimensions of art, this book offers a bold invitation: to sense the world through impact, and to dance time itself differently.