A small business in CT sharing our passion for Irish dance since 1977.
The Shamrock School is a family.
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Welcome to the Shamrock School of Irish Dance!
We provide Irish dance instruction for children ages 4 and up. We teach all levels from beginner to championships. Our dancers have competed at local, regional, national and world competitions. We also do local performances in the central Connecticut area.
We instill poise, passion and a love of Irish dancing in all of our students. While we work hard in all of our classes, we make time for fun by creating show pieces for our end of the year recital.
Some food for thought…
Irish dance is just like any other sport. To succeed in competition there needs to be commitment, dedication and focus from the dancer and the parents. But the beauty of Irish dance is that the competition world is completely optional. If you love competing, or just want to have fun, we will support you!
Our Practice
We teach our students Irish dance, but they learn so much more than that with us. They learn hard work, dedication, perseverance, and gain life long friends.
A Brief History of Irish Dance
By many accounts, the modern form of Irish dancing dates back to the appearance of Dance Masters about 1750. Forerunners of today's Irish dancing teachers, they typically traveled within a county, teaching their repertoire of dance steps and participating in competitions with other Dance Masters. Each step is eight measures or bars of music, hence the term step dancing.
Beginning dancers first learn the soft shoe dances. Girls and women wear soft shoes, or gillies. Boys and men usually dance the soft shoe dances in shoes with hard soles. All dancers use hard shoes with a sort of tap on the toe and heel for hard shoe dances.
Students soon learn two steps for the reel and two more for the light jig. Both women and men dance the reel to music in 4/4 time. As students advance and learn more complicated steps, the dance takes on lots of kicks and leaps. The light jig, and another soft shoe dance, the single jig, are danced to music in 6/8 time. The graceful slip jig, danced only by girls and women, is in 9/8 time. In the tradition of the dancing masters, each Irish dancing school develops its own steps to be used in each of the dance types.
After a student has mastered several soft shoe dances, s/he moves on to learn hard shoe dances such as the hornpipe, treble jig, and traditional set dances.
Competition is a major component of today's Irish dance world. A competition is known as a feis (pronounced "fesh", plural feiseanna, "fesh-anna") and usually sponsored by a local dancing school or Irish cultural association. Dancers advance to participate in regional competitions known as Oireachtas(pronounced "o-rach-tas") and at the highest levels to the World Championships in Ireland (Oireachtas na Cruinne). While competition among the young dancers is keen, the bottom line is that for each of them Irish dancing is FUN, and a link to their Irish heritage.