Jack Anderson told David Hennessy about not for glory, the new show that combines Irish dance, Highland dance and live piping.
A new show rooted in Irish dance, Highland dance and live piping is coming to London.
not for glory, from Jack Anderson and Charlotte Mclean in collaboration with Malin Lewis, is a live dance-theatre gig interspersing the folk tradition with queerness, reclamation and rebellion.
not for glory comes to London’s Cecil Sharp House as part of Dance Umbrella Festival, London’s annual international dance festival.
Jack Anderson brings the Irish dancing to the show.
From Scotland, Jack began Irish dancing professionally in 2008, touring with Rhythm of the Dance and Celtic Legends before working with Breandán de Gallaí in Ériu Dance Company.
This led him to train at Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance.
After more than a decade away, he returned to Irish dance through the development of not for glory.
Charlotte Mclean studied at London Contemporary Dance School and works internationally as a performer, choreographer and interdisciplinary creative. Named Dance Fellow of 2025 by The Arts Foundation, her work has been commissioned by The Place London and Tojo Theater Bern and presented at the V&A, Tramway Glasgow and Alte Münze Berlin among others. Her practice draws from her childhood in Scottish Highland Dance and is rooted in community values and intersectional feminism.
Malin Lewis is a bagpiper, fiddler, instrument maker and award-winning composer.
The team have just brought not for glory to the Fringe in Edinburgh.
Jack Anderson took time to chat to the Irish World.
You took Not For Glory to the recent Edinburgh Fringe, how did it go?
“Really great actually.
“I think it went as well as we could have hoped for in terms of the reactions.
“We were very fortunate with the reviews and all of that kind of thing but actually just from speaking to people after the show, I felt as if I had so many conversations with people who had really understood what we were trying to do, people who really felt the things that we hoped they would feel about the show which is very gratifying.
“I guess that’s the best you can hope for.”
Take us back to the origins of the show. As I understand it it came from you and Charlotte connecting about things you had in common from growing up in your respective worlds of dance, is that right?
“Yeah, absolutely and it is a funny thing that we had known each other for probably ten years at least already before we had this conversation.
“We really were quite close but I think because we met while we were both in contemporary dance training and all the pressures around that, we never really had the thought, ‘Oh actually there could be something really interesting in that similar experience that we have and maybe if we put them together, that could be quite cool’.
“I think it just seems odd that it never occurred to us for a long time.
“We were in contemporary dance class one day and there was an improvisation thing happening and there was loads of people there but we kept gravitating towards each other and we were playing in a sort of dance language that felt a bit Celtic, a sort of style that we both value that could take us somewhere interesting.”
What was the common ground you found, was it the competitive aspect or perhaps the community of the different dance worlds?
“Yeah, I think the competition thing definitely gives you some intensity.
“I think we could really relate to both having been young people who did dance in quite a kind of obsessive way.
“I think when there’s a competition aspect involved then just the style of training that you do or your working method is quite high intensity, there’s that real sort of determination.
“I think something that we both could relate to in each other was the desire to keep going longer and keep trying harder and things that maybe when you’re a bit older don’t feel necessarily so natural but there’s fun in that real obsessive sort of drive.
“I think the other thing that really brought us together actually was thinking back on those childhood experiences of being at competitions and actually how funny a lot of it is just that you find yourself in these quite niche situations where for the people involved, the stakes are so high and it’s so important, kind of life or death but then for anyone who’s just observing from the outside, it maybe all seems a bit quaint or something.
“There’s definitely a real surreal element to some of the memories and the more that we talked about it, the more we laughed about these bizarre characters and funny situations that we had been in and that felt like a real connection actually between the two.”
The third ingredient is the music..
“Malin is just a phenomenal musician, one of the most outrageously talented people I’ve ever met.
“The most important thing about the show is that it has been a real coming together of all of us with our different traditions that we’re coming from, our different expertise.
“That was really fun and quite challenging particularly between Charlotte and Malin and I.
“They’re all amazing creative people.
“It just felt like such a natural fit straight away because I guess having also been a competitive bagpiper they were very familiar with a lot of the stuff that we were talking about, a lot of the memories that we were drawing on so it just really seemed like it made sense.”
Where does the title not for glory come from?
“It kind of has a few meanings.
“It’s a quote from the Declaration of Arbroath which was kind of in the days of William Wallace, this statement that was signed from the people of Scotland essentially saying, ‘We’ll never let the English rule over us’.
“I think the full sentence is something like, ‘It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom’.
“When we were in the very early stages of researching the show, we were looking a lot at those texts and thinking about the nationalism aspect of these dances or identifying with a real culture and that sort of fighting spirit.
“It’s about the rebellion or the belonging to something but it’s also definitely about us now being adults and looking back on those things that we did as kids and having different feelings about the importance of winning or even the necessity of doing competitions at all, whether it’s right to get people to compete or whether we should just all be doing it for fun.
“There’s maybe a little shadow in there also of us wanting to make something that is more of a gig than a show and is really about us and the audience having a good time and not about other people who make shows saying, ‘Oh, that was really clever’.”
It is also not about your audience having to know about Irish dancing or highland dancing or piping, in fact they could come with no knowledge of any of them, isn’t that right?
“Yeah, absolutely.
“I think that’s something that we tried to be really conscious of the whole way through putting it together was to think about, ‘Okay, if just any person was to walk in off the street and see this, what can we do to make them a) have a good time, but b) also feel like they understand what it’s about and that we’re generous with that and that they don’t have to work to sort of figure it out.
“Because I think very often with dance stuff, people can feel that they’re not sure what they’re supposed to think which is not always a nice experience.
“So yeah, we’ve tried to make it very relatable or very accessible and hopefully it works for people who are very familiar with the worlds that we’re referencing but hopefully we’ve also done enough that we’re inviting other people into those worlds who haven’t experienced them before.”
The show has been described as ‘rebellious’, ‘funny’ and ‘fiercely alive’, you must be happy with those kind of descriptions..
“Yeah, absolutely and I think the rebellion thing felt really important all the way through making the show in that we did want the show to really question the structures or systems that we were part of as children going through these competitions but in a very loving way.
“We didn’t want to make it a show that was like, ‘Oh, this is all our trauma from the terrible things that we were forced to do’ because it’s not that at all.
“It’s trying to say it at the same time we really love these worlds that we were part of but there was also things about them that were maybe quite strange.
“We want to invite the people who are still really involved in those worlds to maybe be a bit rebellious with them as well.”
Tell me about your background. I take it you started dancing quite young and then became quite obsessed, is that what it was like for you?
“Yeah, or more so the other way round.
“I think I became obsessed with it first and then it took quite a while before I was able to start actually learning.
“The thing that started me off was I had seen a video of Riverdance and I just couldn’t get enough of it.
“My poor parents were searching for ages for a class for me to go to but in the area where we lived, which is near Stirling, at the time there just wasn’t anything.
“This was also the pre-internet days so it took them two years or something to track down a teacher that I could go to but meanwhile I was still jumping around in front of that video every day.
“Finally they found someone and I’m very fortunate that I had parents who were willing to drive me to Cumbernauld every week, which was a bit of a trek, so that I could go to the class.”
And you remained obsessed with it then..
“Yeah, absolutely.
“I guess once I was in, I never got back out again which again I’m very thankful that my family were able to facilitate that because when I was maybe eight or so, we moved a little bit further away from Cumbernauld which was still the nearest place that had a class so it was quite an undertaking but by then, I was hooked. It was too late.”
You had success in competitions winning the world championship even if it wasn’t called that instead being called the All- Ireland and International Championships..
“Yeah, it was kind of nuts.
“It was a very big deal at the time for me.
“It’s hard not to get really sucked into the competition thing.
“It is a quite a good motivator or an impetus to keep working but I think I was always doing it more so because I thought it was fun and because I wanted to be in a show when I grew up rather than because I was desperate to win things.
“I think I’m also lucky with the teachers that I had that they didn’t put a lot of pressure on us to be winners.
“It was just like, ‘Yeah, show up and give it a bash and have a nice time’.”
Of course you went on to dance in shows like Rhythm of the Dance and Celtic Legends..
“Yeah, it was really amazing.
“I just started going away on tour doing that sort of stuff when I was 17 so it was really going from living in a pretty rural area in Scotland and then suddenly you’re travelling all around the world. You’re getting paid to dance and you’re surrounded by all these other dancers.
“It was just such a nice bunch of people.
“It was such a fun environment and I think I toured for four or five years pretty much non-stop and I don’t think I ever really got over that feeling of being like, ‘I can’t believe this is my life because I’m getting to do the thing that I absolutely love doing every night and see the world and have made all these new friends’.
“It was just so far the opposite extreme from the life that I had had as a 16-year-old.
“It was pretty amazing.”
Then you would take ten years away from dancing before coming back to it..
“Yeah, or away from Irish dancing, I guess.
“I moved into other types of training which was for a few reasons.
“I had done a bit of work for Breandán de Gallaí and he was at that time really kind of starting to work in quite an experimental way with Irish dance so he was using people like me that were trained in Irish dancing but he was asking us to move in quite different ways.
“Suddenly it was like, ‘Oh, I can also move my arms. I’ve never done that before’.
“I think one of the really big things for me working with Breandán was also that we danced to a lot of different types of music, it wasn’t always just jigs and reels which again felt really quite alien but quite exciting.
“I had done a couple of shows with Breandán and it seemed as if there wasn’t anything imminently happening with that and so I guess my other option was to maybe go back to Rhythm of the Dance again but by that time I had been doing the show eight times a week for four and a half years and I was only 21 or 22 but my knees were starting to deteriorate.
“I guess for a combination of all of those reasons, I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I can check out what this other contemporary dance is all about and see if I can do that’.
“So I went to college to train as a contemporary dancer which is where I met Charlotte and really just went all the way down that avenue for 10, 12 years.
“It was only really when I started having these conversations with Charlotte that I imagined I might try Irish dancing again because for a long time it had felt like something that was really just in the past.”
How does it feel to be back doing it?
“Great actually.
“Yeah, I really didn’t know how much I had missed it.
“I’m 35 now so there are things in the body that just feel different from how they did when I was 17 or 18 and that’s to be expected but I was quite pleasantly surprised at how comfortable it still felt in my body actually.
“After such a long break, I was a bit worried that it might feel really alien or that I just wouldn’t even be able to remember how to do it or something, but it’s been very nice to just kind of sink back into it again.”
We spoke about you starting Irish dancing early, were there Irish connections in your family?
“As it turns out, yes but I didn’t find that out until much later.
“When I was doing the dancing growing up, I always had the sensation of being very much a Scottish person who didn’t really have any connection, who was just there because of Riverdance.
“I started in ’96 so I was really probably part of the first wave of people who were there because of those commercial shows and not because of family or community connections but then when I was a teenager, my granny decided to go back and discover the family tree and then we found out we actually were Irish a few generations ago but none of us had known that.”
Where in Ireland do you have roots?
“Up north. If I remember rightly one side was in Ballymena and one was Armagh.”
It would be great to bring the show to Ireland at some point, wouldn’t it?
“I really hope so.
“Yeah, I would love to do that because I think it would just take on a slightly different significance there.
“It felt as if in Edinburgh we had a lot of people in audiences who probably were seeing Irish dancing up close for the first time or maybe seeing it at all for the first time whereas in Ireland you’re just going to get a lot more people who are already some way familiar with it and probably a lot more people who have had their own experiences or their own relationship to it so I think it would be really nice to do that so fingers crossed.”
not for glory plays Cecil Sharp House Tuesday 13 and Wednesday 14 October.
Dance Umbrella runs 7 – 27 October 2026.
For more information, click here.
