Captured by Kim Photography
Trinity Irish Dancers, the Midwest’s premier Irish dance academy, was founded 34 years ago by Mark Howard in a church basement with a dozen students. Since that time, the school has risen to international recognition, earned more than 35 titles in the World Irish Dancing Championships, garnered numerous television and film appearances, and developed an acclaimed professional company into which students may graduate. At the height of their performance season, the days surrounding St. Patrick’s Day, Off the Cuff sat down with the academy’s executive director, Natalie Howard, to discuss “Trinity Magic” and the balance of competition, performance and academics.
What sets Trinity apart as an academy?
We talk about “the balance” all of the time with our kids. There’s two parts to Irish dancing: the competitive route and the performance route. At Trinity we encourage the balance of both. We want the kids to step out of the classroom and get life experiences through competition and through performing, and those life experiences build their confidence and resilience, skills that they can use later in life. Getting out in the community and watching an audience just completely fall in love with your dancing balances that competitive track and the pressure of getting out on stage in front of a judge. There’s definitely a “Trinity Magic” that happens when you balance both.
The other part of the “Trinity Magic” is our teenagers. It’s kind of a tradition at Trinity to have our teenagers lead all of the younger kids, as student teachers and running shows. We’re giving them responsibility and they’re learning life lessons, but they’re also passing on the skills that they learned to all the little kids coming up behind them.
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Tell me about Trinity’s offerings. What is your students’ age range?
We take beginners between 3-and-a-half and 10 and they end up staying in our program until they graduate from high school or even longer. And we find that they usually grow with the program. Irish dancing is just so contagious. You find that the kids that join Irish dancing can never stop moving their feet. They’ll be dancing up and down the aisles in grocery stores or at school. Their feet will be tapping underneath their desks. Once it gets in your system, it’s really hard to not Irish dance [laughs].
How do your students balance academics with Irish dance?
For many this is an extracurricular activity so it’s just a thing that they come to once or twice a week—just like joining soccer or volleyball. But for that small group that are qualifying for international competitions—that are training five days a week plus managing St. Patrick’s Day shows—a lot of time management skills are learned. Particularly this time of year, you’ll find kids doing homework at a show, before a show, after a show. And again, it’s that balance. When they’re doing this heavy training for the World Championship and every practice is very intense and focused, it’s an outlet to be able to drive to a performance at a pub and just have fun.
The month of March is your busiest season. Tell me about it.
In March we have about 300 appearances all over Wisconsin and Illinois and that includes private shows, public shows and TV appearances. So we’re all over the place and everything’s listed on our website. We do about 450 shows per year and 300 of them are in the month of March.
For information about enrolling a child in The Trinity Academy of Irish Dance or about upcoming shows, visit trinityirishdance.com.
