Irish dancing school aims to guide next generation of dancers at Mid-Winter Ceilidh

(Damian Smith / CTV News)

The Mid-Winter Ceilidh was hosted at The Exchange in Regina on Saturday, including performances such as fiddling, Irish and highland dancers, as well as pipe bands.

With a 30-minute performance in Irish dance, dancer Megan Beach will be busy for the next month with St. Patrick’s Day approaching.

Beach is also the owner of Blakey Irish Dancers in Regina, teaching kids as young as four years of age. Now 29 years of age, Beach has danced since she was five years old.

“When I’m at the dance studio, I kind of forget everything else that’s happening in the world and the rest of my life. With Irish dance specifically, it’s really technical and it’s really hard just in general, so I think it’s just something that I can really focus on.”

Beach has three to five performances per day from March 13-15, and then on March 17.

She currently teaches five children and three adults. As there is a big age gap between some of her students, her teaching styles may change from time to time.

“For the little kids, we do more jumping and just more fun things to do, such as games, you just want to get them used to being in a class and moving. Then, we’ll slowly add in the technique. For the adults, it’s more like a fitness class, especially for the ones who have never done dance before. We’ll start with more fitness and then we’ll add in technique as we go along, and then we’ll build into full dances for them.”

Performing with some of those young students on Saturday, her youngest is four years of age performing for the first time.

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“It’s really nice for me to see when the kids have their breakthroughs or when they get a dance or their technique improves,” she said.

Beach has been Irish dancing competitively since she was 12 years old and has competed in five North American championships.

Irish dancing is a fined-tuned skill, requiring weeks of practice. Beginner level dancers, as well as warmups, usually take place with soft shoes. Hard shoes, with that classic sound touching the stage, is when dancers are really thriving.”

“If we’re learning a new dance, we’ll break it down and then it’ll take a couple of weeks to get that. Then we’ll move on to our other shoes, the ones that make noise, the hard shoes. We just practice with the same things over and over again, to make sure that they’re ready for the stage.”