Festival Style Irish Dance with Kate Spanos - 6-Week Fall Session

Work on your control, strength, musicality, and stage presence with this special 6-week session in festival style Irish dance with Kate Spanos! The session will focus on the techniques that are typical of this style’s “slow” slip jig and set dances and you will learn some choreographies that put these techniques into practice. Festival style Irish dance is from the Belfast area of Northern Ireland and was innovated by Patricia Mulholland (or "Miss Mulholland") in the 1930s to 1950s to draw the focus of Irish dance towards individual expression, with a focus on performance and musicality. Festival slip jigs and set dances are much slower than their feis style counterparts, and dancers pay particular attention to expressing "light and shade" in the music. Grace, elegance, and control are key features of festival style. Working on these aspects of your dancing will greatly enhance your performance, no matter what your goals are! Kate Spanos is a dancer and dance scholar from the Washington, DC, area with a Ph.D. in dance and performance studies from the University of Maryland and an M.A. in traditional Irish dance performance from the University of Limerick (UL). She has been teaching Irish dance since 1999. She first learned festival style from Ruth McCalmot Long of the Royal Tara Dance Academy in Carrickfergus and Larne while studying at UL. She currently studies festival style with Lauren Smyth from County Down through the @laurensmythacademy. For more about Kate, visit www.thekatespanos.com. This event is open to everyone, including dancers from any Irish dance school or style.