Virtuoso Irish-American fiddler Eileen Ivers - a nine-time All Ireland Champion, founding member of Cherish the Ladies and an original "Riverdance" solo musician - brings her passion for cross-cultural music and dance to Gainesville.

"Beyond the Bog Road," Ivers' latest touring production, hits the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Featuring 11 musicians and two dancers, "Beyond the Bog Road" maps the musical journey of Irish immigrants to and across the United States and Canada. In it, Ivers demonstrates how early Irish music in the New World interacted with Scottish, Choctaw, African-American and Francophone traditions, even merging into and influencing new genres like tap dance, Appalachian clogging, vaudeville and bluegrass.

Ivers herself is the daughter of Irish immigrants. Though she graduated in Mathematics at Iona College, Ivers has spent her life fully immersed in traditional fiddle music and, with more than 100 albums to her name, is known for the multicultural scope to which "Beyond the Bog Road" is devoted.

"Bog Road" percussive dance soloist Matthew Olwell also was surrounded by traditional Irish music and dance from an early age, and his own artistic journey mirrors the peripatetic paths to which Ivers' show pays tribute.

"My father is an instrument maker. He makes wooden flutes for Irish music," Olwell says, referring to Patrick Olwell, his internationally known father. "So even though I grew up in Virginia, which people might not necessarily see as a hotbed for Irish culture, I was around a lot of it because of the family business - we went to sessions and festivals and workshops constantly. So I grew up seeing all this Irish dancing, and it's just one of those things where you think, yeah, that looks like a good time."

Olwell starting his dance training under the master tutelage of Donny Golden.

I started performing when I was in high school with a company called Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble, based in Annapolis, Maryland. I apprenticed with them from age 16 and then joined the company full-time when I was 18."

With Footworks, Olwell guest performed in "Riverdance" in 1996 in London, marking one if his earliest collaborations with Ivers.

"I'd also seen her at numerous festivals and sort of jumped up and done some impromptu dancing with her on several occasions," he laughs.

"This time around, the only dancers are myself and a dancer named Kristyn Fontanella. We perform in six or seven numbers total. She's representing the Irish step dancer, I believe she was in 'Riverdance,' so I think that the idea as far as the dance portion of 'Beyond the Bog Road' goes is that she's the Irish dancer, I'm the American, and we're trying to trace some of that story of the Irish immigrants coming to the States and being influenced, and also influencing in turn, other dancing.

"So we're sort of juxtaposing and also mixing the Irish step and with American forms like clogging and tap."

The music heard in "Beyond the Bog Road" is well-suited for the dancing that will be seen in the show, he says.

"It's an Irish band, but they've got, you know, drum sets, and really a very big sound. So it's exciting music," Olwell says. "And they're blending in swing, Appalachia and French Canadian tunes to their own style."

"So for me, it's really good dance music," he laughs.