The Bay Agenda: Keepers of the Steps Preserving Bay Area Irish Culture

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with KALW & United Irish Cultural Center at this program honoring local Irish step dance history & stories.

Join KALW for an evening exploring Irish step dancing as living history, cultural memory, and contemporary performance.

This conversation highlights Keepers of the Steps, the living archive and cultural program at the United Irish Cultural Center dedicated to preserving generations of Bay Area Irish dancers, teachers, and families. Through stories, images, and lived experience, we’ll reflect on how dance carries lineage, identity, and community forward.

Bringing together perspectives from cultural stewardship, theatrical living history, and multidisciplinary dance-making, the program explores how Irish and Celtic performance traditions continue to evolve on modern stages. Together, we’ll consider preservation and innovation, place-making and performance, and what it means to keep tradition embodied, adaptive, and alive.

Anne Cassidy-Carew, Keepers of the Steps Founding Co-Director

Anne Cassidy Carew is a first-generation San Francisco Irish American and founding co-director of Keepers of the Steps, the living archive and cultural program at the United Irish Cultural Center celebrating the Bay Area’s Irish step dancing legacy. A lifelong member of the UICC community, Anne has served in numerous leadership roles, including Board President and Cultural Programming Director. A career counselor in the education field, she brings a passion for teaching, mentoring, and inspiring others to her cultural work. Deeply rooted in the City by the Bay and its Irish community, Anne devotes countless volunteer hours to ensuring the success of UICC cultural programs, including stewardship of the Dowling Library, the first Irish library in the United States.

Eileen Mize, Keepers of the Steps Founding Co-Director

Eileen Mize is a proud third-generation San Francisco Irish American and founding co-director of Keepers of the Steps, a living archive and cultural program at the United Irish Cultural Center dedicated to preserving the history of Irish step dancing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her lifelong connection to Irish dance began at the McBride School of Irish Dance and includes years of solo competition and appearances at the World Championships. A creative communications professional, Eileen brings both professional expertise and deep personal passion to her work as a visual storyteller gathering photos, stories, and memories that celebrate the dancers, teachers, and communities who shaped this enduring tradition.

Drew Patterson, Producer & Production Manager, Red Barn Productions

Drew Patterson is a producer and production manager with Red Barn Productions, where he represents the third generation of the Patterson family’s pioneering work in Theatrical Living History. Born into a legacy founded by his grandparents, Ron and Phyllis Patterson, Drew continues a tradition begun in the early 1960s of bringing history and imagination vividly to life. He produces renowned immersive events including The Great Dickens Christmas Fair and the Marin Irish Festival, and has collaborated with the United Irish Cultural Center. Drew’s vast experience in live entertainment across San Francisco and the Bay Area has included the exploration of Irish and Celtic motifs in performance culture, illuminating how history, music, and storytelling converge on the modern stage.

Megan Lowe, Founder Megan Lowe Dances

Megan Lowe is a dancer, choreographer, performer, aerialist, singer-songwriter, filmmaker, teacher, and administrator of Chinese and Irish descent, making dance art in the San Francisco Bay Area, situated on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land. Through Megan Lowe Dances, she creates courageous multidisciplinary dance works, rooted in care, that transform spaces with dynamic place-making, playful partner-work, and daring aerial/vertical dance. Megan is a recipient of 2 Izzie Awards, and her recent choreographies have been seen at Legion of Honor, ODC, Fort Mason, de Young, and 500 Capp Street, as well as in United States of Asian America Festival, APAture, SF Aerial Arts Festival, CAAMFest, SF Trolley Dances, and on KQED Live. Megan has performed with Flyaway Productions, Dance Brigade, Lenora Lee Dance, Scott Wells & Dancers, Lizz Roman & Dancers, and more. She is a teaching artist for Joe Goode Performance Group, BANDALOOP, Flyaway, and her alma mater Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, where she works as the Program Associate. She regularly teaches contact improvisation, vertical dance, site-specific dance, and contemporary dance for organizations, schools, universities, and dance festivals around the Bay Area and California, and has also taught in Singapore, Ireland, and Japan.

Come early to see Raymundo Valdez’s Prismatic City: Landmarks in Light, a solo art exhibition showing the city as it lives: layered, luminous, & constantly changing. RSVP for the March 6 opening here. The show is on view at KALW’s Live Event Studio Art Gallery through April 10.

There is a $10 – $20 sliding scale suggested donation for this event. Nobody will be turned away for lack of funds.