Jig

The light jig is danced on the toes with strong elevation, the knees turned out and the free leg crossing in front, so that the dance reads as a series of springs and hops on a compound pulse. The slip jig uses longer, more sustained travelling steps with rises and points that stretch across its nine beats. The treble jig moves the whole thing into hard shoes at a slow tempo and fills the beats with trebles, heel clicks and stamps, so that power and sound clarity replace elevation as the object. Across all of them the modern competitive style holds the arms straight at the sides and the torso still, which throws all the attention onto the legs and feet.

Primarily a solo dance in its Irish competitive and display forms. Jig tunes also accompany group set dancing and céilí figures, and in Scottish and English country dance a jig is a tune type that any number of couples may dance to in formation.

Jigs are core competition dances at feiseanna under An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha and the other Irish dancing organisations, with the light jig, single jig, slip jig and treble jig each danced at prescribed tempos and step counts. The slip jig is in most competitive contexts restricted to female dancers, a convention of the grading system rather than anything inherent to the dance. Judging weighs timing, turnout, elevation, carriage and, in hard shoe, the clarity of each sound.

Irish jigs are the most elaborated and the most codified. Scottish jigs function mainly as country-dance and solo tune types, danced with Highland or country-dance technique rather than Irish step vocabulary. Older Irish regional styles differ sharply from the competitive standard — the sean-nós dancing of Connemara stays low, loose and improvised, with relaxed arms and no fixed sequence, which is much closer to how jigs were danced before the competitive era.

Jig is not a synonym for any fast Irish dance; it names a specific compound meter, and reels and hornpipes are different animals. Nor is it always in 6/8 — the slip jig's 9/8 is fully part of the family. The still upper body and rigid arms are also often taken as ancient and explained by stories about clerical disapproval; they are a later convention of the competitive and dancing-master tradition, and older vernacular styles used the arms freely.