Oireachtas

Getting ready to compete.

You’ll be eating turkey in the comfort of your own home. The hordes of Irish dancers competing in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Oireachtas will be downing their Thanksgiving feast in a Center City hotel or one of the surrounding restaurants. Maybe that’s the Irish dance equivalent of carbo loading.

Whatever, they’ll have a couple of days to work off all that stuffing and pumpkin pie. Once the competition starts, those kids (well, most of them are kids) will be dancing their legs off pretty much non-stop. When they’re not competing in the halls, they’ll be practicing in the hallways.

In celebration of this high-stepping festival, we put together a playlist of over 30 videos highlighting Irish dance in the Philadelphia area. We’ve tried to show every school. If we’ve missed any, let us know, and we’ll see if we have a video in our now vast collection. If it’s there, we’ll add it.

Happy watching!

The U.S. flag led the way as dancers processed onto the Kimmel Center stage with flags from every nation representated in the championships.

In the beginning, the opening ceremony of the World Irish Dancing Championships was a dignified affair, with dancers from around the world parading onto the Kimmel Center stage with the flags of their countries, the Olympic theme playing in the background.

After that, assorted dignitaries, including Mayor Michael Nutter, took the stage to make welcoming speeches.

And it seemed that the Sunday evening ceremony would end in pomp and circumstance.

But whoever might have thought so probably had not reckoned on the Greater Kensington String Band.

The Kensington Band took the joint (can we call Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center a “joint?”) by storm. Some 6,000 dancers and thousands more family members, dance teachers, judges, officials and fans from around the world are attending this first-ever championship in North America, and it was pretty clear most of them had never seen a genuine Philadelphia Mummer before.

It didn’t take them long to get into the spirit of things, though. Much to the amazement of the Kensington band—and possibly the horror of Kimmel Center ushers—dozens of dancers converged on the stage, some of them clambering up over the edge in their clunky hard shoes, dignity forgotten.

In a matter of minutes, it felt more like New Year’s Day on Broad Street.

Like everybody else in the place, a photographer from Maryland was swept up in the spirit of things. “This is a great day for Philadelphia,” he said.

Ain’t it the truth.  We have photos, above.

Check out our Mummers videos:

• Video 1
• Video 2

Here they are, the McAleer "Ghillies."

Many of the dance schools that competed in the Mid-Atlantic Oireachtas down at the Center City Marriott created custom T-shirts for their teams. One set of tees stood out above the rest—those worn by the McAleer School out of Claymont, Delaware.

You might have to be a dancer to get the joke, but emblazoned in baseball script across the McAleer pinstriped jerseys was the word “Ghillies.” (Ghillies, for you non-dancers, are dance shoes.)

To Tricia Beichner, who designed the shirt, it was a no-brainer: “”The Phillies won the World Series, and that’s why we did it.”

The shirts proved so popular that not only the bewigged dancers were wearing them. (And that’s a look, let me tell you.) “It’s beyond the team,” said Beichner. “The dads and the moms bought the shirt, too.”

You’ll find more pictures from this year’s Oireachtas, a huge competition for Irish dancers throughout the mid-Atlantic states, in our photo essay.

The Coyle girls, posing for the Mom and Pop-arrazzi.

It was a Kerri Strug moment.

Kerri Strug, you may recall, was the U.S. gymnast who wrenched her ankle badly as she landed the vault in the 1996 Olympics, collapsing in tears.

On Saturday, in competition at the 2007 Mid-Atlantic Oireachtas in Philadelphia, I watched a young dancer breeze through her routine. It wasn’t flawless, but still, it was pretty good. As the piano accompanist struck the last note, the dancer’s hard shoes slammed into the floor like a rifle shot. In that moment, her face registered not relief or triumph—relief being the far more typical response up to that point—but only shock and pain.

She limped off the stage and sobbed all the way back across the competition hall to the front row, to where her teachers were sitting.

Yes, they wear Shirley Temple wigs, flouncy lamé skirts and sparkling rhinestone tiaras, but Irish dance competition is not pretty. A lot of these girls could crack walnuts with their toes. I can think of at least one NFL quarterback who could learn a thing or two about toughness from some of those 6-foot-1, bird-legged 14-year-olds in their corkscrew curls. (My partner Denise saw one of the girls wearing a T-shirt that read, “If Irish dancing were easy, it would be called hockey.”)

The kids can’t help it: Gotta dance.

I’m not about to suggest that they are altogether lacking in external motivation. I’m certain that dominating stage parents must exist. But most of the parents I ran into seemed to be just along for the ride. The dads seemed especially burdened. Balancing half-moon-shaped dress cases, shoe bags and makeup kits, the intrepid feis sherpas scaled the steep escalators at the Marriott Midtown, where the Oireachtas is held. Moms touched up hairpieces and fastened backpieces with strips of Velcro. (The Oireachtas runs on Velcro.)

I suspect a lot of these dancers would want to compete, regardless of parental desires or inclinations. For them, Irish dance is not just an interesting hobby. It’s more of an indispensable life element, like air, water or text messaging.

Which is pretty much the conclusion you reach when one of them almost takes your nose off with a high kick, which happened (or nearly happened) to me as I was entering the Starbucks on the ground floor of the Marriott. There is practically never a moment when the competitors are not in motion. No one at the Oireachtas just walks. They skip, prance and caper just about everywhere, all the time.

On elevators and escalators, in the gift shop, or waiting in line to get into the Hard Rock across the street—they danced. Wearing gym shorts or jammie bottoms, Crocs or Hello Kitty scuffs, they danced. My guess is, more than a few of them dance in their sleep. They probably dance in line for communion.

On my way to the Marriott, I passed a girl in sweats, a winter jacket and Uggs who was making her way along Chestnut Street near Macy’s. The first giveaway that she might be an Irish dancer was the wig and tiara. But the second, more obvious, cue was that she was up on her Ugg-encased toes and boogying all the way up Chestnut Street.

Hey, gotta dance.