Eileen Carson
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Describing herself as coming from parents who were “upwardly mobile hillbillies”, Eileen Carson Schatz has dedicated her life to preserving and promoting the folk-art traditions of clogging and percussive dance.
As the director of the Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble since 1979, her efforts have delighted audiences of all ages and cultures around the world, including as guest artists in the London run of Riverdance and representing American culture on a Smithsonian Institution tour of Japan.
Now based in Annapolis, Maryland, Eileen Carson Schatz has received many honours and accolades and she was selected as Artist of the Year for 2006 by Young Audiences of Maryland. Her first steps in the public performance of clogging and percussive dance came in 1971 when the Green Grass Cloggers came together with a love of traditional Southern Appalachian music and dance. Learning from the old-time buck dancers and flatfooters of North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, they helped to popularise traditional clogging. In 1979, three of the dancers, including Eileen, moved to Maryland and formed the Fiddle Puppet Dancers which became the Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble in 1994.
Footworks went on to collaborate with and enlist masters of many forms of traditional percussive dance, including Irish, Scottish, English, Quebecois, Cape Breton, South African and African American.
Today, Footworks remains true to the traditions of Southern Appalachian music and dance while celebrating connected roots and branches. Eileen believes that each principle artist adds to the authenticity of Footworks’ presentations by bringing his or her own cultural background.