African American Dancer Morgan Bullock Debuts on the Riverdance 25th Anniversary Tour

Morgan Bullock

Morgan Bullock, a 22 year-old African-American from Richmond, Virginia, is part of this year’s Riverdance 25th Anniversary Tour performing in 40+ American and Canadian cities across North America. 

Riverdance comes to the Boch Center's Wang Theatre from May 10-15, 2022 in Boston, a long-time bastion of Irish culture, music and dance, with dozens of Irish dance studios devoted to the art of Irish step dancing.   Boston hosed the prestigious World Irish Dancing Championships in March 2013, only the second American city selected to host this international event. 

A dancer since the age of three, Morgan is the first female African-American dancer in the acclaimed show, which has been a worldwide phenomenon since it debuted at the 1994 Eurovision show in Dublin.  In fact, it was a YouTube video of that famous performance, featuring lead dancers Jean Butler from New York and Michael Flatley from Chicago, that inspired Morgan to fully turn her attention to Irish dance as her singular passion. 

She took lessons at the Baffa Academy of Irish Dance in Richmond from Jessie Baffa, herself a former Riverdance and Lord of the Dance cast member. Two years ago, a TikTok video of Morgan dancing intricate Irish steps to the music of Savage remix by Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé went viral, getting over a million hits and garnering her praise from around the world. The folks at Riverdance saw the video and offered her a spot in the show. 

In September 2021, Morgan made her official Riverdance debut in England, and later wrote on her Instagram, “Words cannot describe the feeling of performing my first show with Riverdance! To say this is a dream come true is an understatement. I feel so blessed to be able to do what I love alongside some of the most amazing people I’ve met. The dream continues tomorrow and I cannot wait!” 

Tap Dancing and Minstrelsy 

Riverdance has always embraced a multicultural perspective, even while celebrating Irish dance at its centerpiece. Ever since the show began touring the world, it has featured a Russian dance troupe, a Spanish flamenco and Black tap dancers who engage in a dance-off with Irish step dancers. And there is always an underlying immigration theme in Riverdance with universal appeal to audiences everywhere. 

The Irish-Black connection to music and dance goes back to the early days of America, according to writer Leni Sloan, an authority on the shared cultural experiences between Irish-Americans and African-Americans.  Sloan notes that the two groups traded music and dance steps in places like Kentucky back in the 18th century, when the Irish were indentured servants, and Blacks were enslaved, sharing Irish melodies and African laments. And it was the fusion of dance steps from these two different cultures that came to create Tap Dancing as a unique American art form.

In the early 19th century the interaction spawned minstrelsy, infamous for lampooning not just Blacks and Irish but Germans too. Then came vaudeville, which gleefully lampooned Blacks, Irish, Germans, Jews, American Indians, Chinese and anyone else who could serve as a racially-tinged punchline. 

Other Black Irish Dancers

In 1933, Inez Emptage, a Dublin-born Black girl living in Brooklyn won several Irish dance competitions in New York.  Limelight Magazine, published by writer and Olympian James Brendan Connolly of South Boston, reported that Emptage, “danced her way to three first-places in the Three-Hand Reel, the Double Jig, and the Reel in Brooklyn, NY…the other girls who danced with Miss Emptage in the Three-Hand Reel were white.” 

Emptage was born in Dublin and moved to America when she was one year old. She attended St. Joseph’s High School in Brooklyn, where she received a special class award for her typing. Her dance instructor James McKenna entered her in the competition, which was organized by the United Ireland Countries Association. 

Some 70 years later, in 2002,  Dublin-born music teacher Caroline Duggan formed an Irish dance troupe called Keltic Dreams at Public School 59 in Bronx, New York. The student body was 27% Black and 71% Hispanic, many of them children of Puerto Rican parents. The troupe became the pride of New York, marching in the Fifth Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade and dancing up and down the East Coast. 

In June 2006, Keltic Dream traveled to the Boston area for the annual Irish Festival at the Irish Cultural Centre in Canton, where they were enthusiastically received. Stonehill College in Easton helped pay the group’s travel expenses and bestowed on them the Building Bridges Award. After that, Duggan took Keltic Dreams to Ireland, where they performed live and on television, meeting Ireland’s President Mary Robinson along the way. 

In fact, it was Ireland's President Mary Robinson who famously articulated the sentiment, back in 1995, that “Irishness is not simply territorial,” when speaking about the Irish Diaspora. Irishness, she noted, is a sense of shared culture and appreciation that extends not just to the Diaspora but to anyone who wants to embrace it. 

That sentiment aligns with Bullock’s own self-perception of being a young African-American woman from Virginia who decisively took up Irish dancing at the age of ten and has never looked back. 

“We're proud Irish dancers,” Bullock says. “We call ourselves Irish dancers, because that's what we are, whether we come from Ireland or not.” 

Tourism Ireland, which markets the island of Ireland in North America, is a big supporter of the Riverdance 25th Anniversary Tour.  It created a special video of the cast at some of Ireland’s iconic sites, including the Cliffs of Moher, the Giant’s Causeway and Dublin.

- Research by Michael Quinlin