May 11, 2024
At 7 p.m. on a Tuesday in Munich's Glockenbach district, the floor of a converted gymnastics hall rattles under the percussion of hard shoes. Twenty adults line up in four rows, counting out a hornpipe in broken German and English. "And—hop, back, toe," calls the instructor, switching midway through the phrase. Nobody misses a beat.
This is the Munich Irish Dance Academy (MIDA), founded in 2021 by former Riverdance principal dancer Aoife Kelly and répétiteur Mark Brennan. Both had followed touring productions through Munich for years. When pandemic closures idled Dublin's theaters, they relocated permanently. They started with twelve students. By spring 2024, MIDA enrolled 140 dancers across adult and youth programs.
From Empty Hall to Regular Gig
Kelly and Brennan's first Munich class met in a borrowed yoga studio with a posted floorplan for socially distanced dancing. Within eighteen months, they had secured a lease on their current space and formed a performance troupe, the Munich Celtic Steppers.
The Steppers' breakthrough came at the 2023 Munich St. Patrick's Day festival on Odeonsplatz, where they performed a twenty-minute set before an estimated crowd of 8,000. "We'd done corporate events and pub gigs," Brennan says. "That was the first time we felt the city was actually watching." The troupe has since become a regular booking at the Munich Irish Festival in September and the winter Tollwood market, though they still rehearse around members' day jobs in IT, nursing, and engineering.
Who Shows Up
MIDA's student body sketches an unlikely cross-section of Munich. Roughly 40 percent are German nationals with no Irish background. Another 30 percent are Irish expats or their children. The remainder comes from elsewhere: Brazil, India, the United States, Russia. Classes are taught in both English and German, with instructors toggling between languages mid-phrase.
Tobias Weber, a 34-year-old mechanical engineer from Stuttgart, started beginner classes in January 2023 after spotting a Steppers performance at Tollwood. "I had done ballroom as a teenager," he says. "Irish dance appealed because it's so precise. There's no partner to compensate for your mistakes." Weber now performs with the Steppers' intermediate ensemble and describes the social scene as "more important than the dancing, honestly. I know more Irish people now than I did living in Stuttgart for ten years."
The Education Claim, Checked
The original version of this story stated that local schools had incorporated Irish dance into physical education programs. That claim could not be verified. What is happening is more modest: since 2023, MIDA instructors have led one-off workshops at three Munich-area secondary schools—Gymnasium Münchenstein, Wilhelmsgymnasium, and the European School Munich—as part of cultural-week programming. None have added Irish dance to their standing PE curriculum.
MIDA has, however, built a sustainable youth track. It now runs Saturday classes for ages six to sixteen, capped at fifteen students per level. The waiting list for the under-ten beginner group currently stands at eight names.
Bavaria Meets Belfast
The question of fusion—whether Munich Irish dance is developing a distinct local style—is still open. Kelly is cautious: "There's a difference between innovation and dilution. We teach the syllabus. The music is traditional. But our choreographers are German, Brazilian, American. That shows up in the arm work, in the theatrical framing."
One example: the Steppers' 2024 Tollwood piece, Isar, named for the river that runs through Munich. The set opened with a slow hornpipe danced in bare feet on a wooden platform meant to evoke a riverbank, then accelerated into a full-company reel. "It's not radical," Brennan acknowledges. "But it is local. We're not pretending we're in Dublin."
What's Actually Next
MIDA's next public performance is scheduled for June 15, 2024, at the Kulturzentrum Trudering, where the Steppers will premiere a forty-minute program of new choreography. Tickets are priced at €18, with a €12 student rate. The academy is also adding a Monday evening adult beginner session in September to accommodate the waiting list.
The broader Irish dance scene in Munich remains small. There are two other schools with Irish dance offerings—both focused on competitive feiseanna rather than public performance—and no dedicated Irish dance venue. What MIDA has built is not a renaissance in the historical sense but something more workaday: a stable institution with a roster, a rental contract, and a constituency that keeps showing up on Tuesday nights.
Whether that counts as a cultural movement depends on whom you ask. For Tobias Weber, the answer is practical. "I have my dance shoes in
