At 8 p.m. on a Thursday, the second-floor studio at Sunset Academy of Irish Dance fills with the percussive crack of hard shoes on maple flooring. Fifteen dancers stand in rigid formation, arms pinned to their sides, preparing to launch into a treble jig. Then the track switches. A synthesized bass line drops beneath the fiddle loop, and two dancers break formation, threading pop-and-lock arm movements through footwork that would still pass muster at a competitive feis.
"Hold it— Mai, your arms are getting lazy," calls Erin O'Leary, crossing the floor with her phone still recording. "If we're doing this, we're doing this. The feet stay traditional. Everything else can bend."
O'Leary, 34, has spent eight years building a reputation as one of the most divisive choreographers in Sunset City's Irish dance community. Depending on whom you ask, she's either saving the art form from museum-piece irrelevance or vandalizing centuries of discipline. She prefers a third interpretation: "I'm trying to make the tradition survive," she said during a break last month. "You can't pass something down if no one under thirty wants to watch it."
The Old Steps, Still Taught
Sunset City— a mid-sized port city on the Atlantic coast, nicknamed for its western-facing bluffs— has never been an obvious Irish dance hub. Its immigrant history leans more Portuguese and Cape Verdean than Irish. Yet the Sunset Academy, founded in 1997 by Riverdance alum Sean McBride, now enrolls 200 students across three locations. On any given Saturday, children as young as four learn the classic reels, jigs, and hornpipes that McBride studied in Dublin.
McBride, 61, still teaches four days a week. His advanced competitive class remains stubbornly traditional: no recorded backing tracks, no arm movement beyond the prescribed carriage, no fusion. "The form is the form," he said bluntly. "If you change the engine, it's not the same car."
But even McBride acknowledges that his competitive stream has shrunk. A decade ago, he fielded twelve dancers at the regional championships. Last March, he took four. Meanwhile, O'Leary's performance ensemble— which McBride privately calls "the circus troupe"— has grown from eight dancers to thirty-seven since 2019. Her students rarely compete. They sell out showcases.
What Fusion Actually Looks Like
The tension between preservation and reinvention isn't abstract here. It plays out in specific choreographic choices, debated in studio hallways and Facebook comment threads.
O'Leary's 2023 piece Crosaire offers the clearest case study. The twenty-minute work— named after the Irish word for "crossroads"— opens with six dancers executing a classic St. Patrick's Day set dance in unison. At the three-minute mark, the lighting shifts from warm amber to clinical white, and the choreography splinters. Three dancers maintain the traditional line while three others orbit them, incorporating balletic grand jetés and hip-hop freezes. In the final section, two performers are suspended on aerial silks, their feet continuing a soft-shoe slip jig while their bodies spiral overhead.
"The hardest part wasn't the aerial work," said dancer Naomi Okonkwo, 26, who trained in ballet before joining O'Leary's ensemble in 2021. "It was keeping the Irish technique clean while your body wants to engage your arms, your core, everything ballet taught you to use. You're fighting your own training to stay true to the form."
Not everyone applauds. At last year's Sunset City Irish Dance Festival— the annual August event that has become the scene's central battleground— a small group of traditionalists walked out during Crosaire's premiere. O'Leary noticed. "I'd rather people hate it than feel nothing," she said. "But I also understand. If you spent forty years keeping your arms still, watching someone spin on silk probably feels like a slap."
The Festival: A Measured Truce
The Sunset City Irish Dance Festival, now in its fourteenth year, has learned to accommodate both camps. The three-day event, held at the waterfront Marquez Theater, drew approximately 4,200 attendees in 2024— a record, according to festival director Luisa Fernandes.
Fernandes structures the programming deliberately. Day one belongs to the traditionalists: competitive solo championships, ceili team performances, and a masterclass with a guest adjudicator from An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha, Dublin's global governing body for Irish dance. Day two shifts to fusion and contemporary works, including O'Leary's ensemble and visiting groups from Boston and Chicago. Day three mixes both, often ending with a collaborative finale that Fernandes commissions explicitly to force conversation
