Irish dance | The Lifelong Dance Student

I hope you’ve had a great summer? I’m just coming to the end of a relaxing two weeks off work…😭

In our first week, my SO and I went to North Devon for a relaxing week by the coast. We stayed in a little apartment in Lynmouth and did lots of walking and visiting National Trust properties and fishing villages. We also did a boat trip to Lundy Island on our last day. Unfortunately the 2 hour voyage there was extremely choppy, our boat rolling around like you wouldn’t believe, to the point that most of the 150+ passengers were using sick bags. Not nice! I just managed to avoid it by pulling my body up the stairs to the fresh air of the upper deck and trying not to look at the rising and falling water, but my poor SO didn’t 🙁

Anyway, it created camaraderie among the passengers and we chatted to people who we kept bumping into later on when wandering around the island. Everyone felt ill! Thankfully the boat trip back to the mainland in the afternoon was so much better (you could eat, talk, take photos and like, walk LOL).

In our second week, we visited Osterley Park National Trust House in West London (making good use of our membership gift!), but the main task of the week was to paint the kitchen walls to finish off our Property Brothers style Farrow and Ball makeover, which began earlier in the summer with painting the cupboards and spraying the handles hammered black. Almost finished! I might do a separate kitchen makeover post at some point.

On Thursday we travelled into London to see the show Heartbeat of Home at the Piccadilly Theatre, to get my latest Irish dance fix! First we had pizza and pasta at Vapiano in Soho, before browsing some of the quirky shops and then heading to the theatre’s top floor bar, for a drink before our matinee performance at 2.30pm.

Heartbeat of Home comes from the producers of the world famous Riverdance, and is a high energy show telling the story of the common ground found by immigrants who travelled to the new world with nothing “but the hopes and histories remembered in the music”, through an amalgamation of dance styles, namely Irish soft shoe and hard shoe dance, Flamenco, Latin, Hip Hop, and Contemporary. I also spotted a bit of tap dance in there! There was an amazing live singer and live musicians on stage, which included the traditional Irish Uilleann Pipes and Bodhran drum. It was fantastic!

The theme of leaving one’s homeland echoed Rhythm of the Dance which I saw at my local theatre recently, but Heartbeat of Home differs with the addition of other dance styles and cultures.

Verdict: Still obsessed with Irish Dance!

The show is at the Piccadilly Theatre, London until 13th October.

Anyway, back to work on Monday – boo!

My tap class is now out for the Summer… kind of! We finished our S.O.B routine on Thursday lunchtime with a bang and chatted away afterwards about what we’d be doing over the Summer and so on. Our teacher also advertised the 2 workshop that she’ll be running next Wednesday and Thursday evenings – Tap Improvisation & Choreography (Weds) and Tap Shim Sham (Thurs). I’ll be doing the Improvisation class, but probably not the Shim Sham this year due to another engagement (BBQ!).

In the evening my SO and I went to our local theatre to see Rhythm of the Dance 20th Anniversary Tour, featuring the National Dance Company of Ireland! I was looking forward to it all day and the show did not disappoint!

The show set the scene with a haunting Celtic song, which reminded me of Lord of the Rings and Enya. Then we were introduced to the dancers who took us on a live musical and rhythmic journey through the history of Ireland and the Irish people, including emigration across the pond to the USA.

The dancing was spectacular. There was a mixture of soft shoe dance and hard shoe step dance. Dancers leaping like gazelles, pounding the floor with shotgun rhythms, legs moving into complicated positions… at speed. As a tap dancer in training, my eyes were glued to their feet, trying to work out just some of what they were doing – impossible at that speed! There was a section where one of main dancers did his steps very slowly, before gradually picking up the speed. Something we do in tap!

The principal male and female leads were incredible, particularly the male lead who commanded huge stage presence. There were live singers and musicians on stage, playing traditional instruments, including the amazing Bodhran (drum), the Irish flute and low whistle, the Uilleann pipes, the fiddle and the banjo. The audience were encouraged to clap along and even sing along at one point.

I particularly enjoyed the seductive ‘Beat of the Bodhran’ dance, with the male troupe hammering out rhythms as the Bodhran player tries to seduce the female leader, and then the fun ‘Swing Time’ section, featuring the Charleston. But really, I enjoyed the whole thing.

I actually came away from the show full of inspiration and ideas for the upcoming tap improvisation workshop, which I didn’t anticipate at all.

Verdict: Stunning! Spectacular! I’m obsessed!