In a converted community center on the outskirts of Guayabal, Venezuela, a dozen children lace up hard shoes and line up before a wall of mirrors. Their instructor counts out a reel in Spanish, then switches to English for the steps: "shuffle, hop, back, two, three." The floor vibrates with the synchronized thunder of fiberglass tips striking vinyl. This is the Academia de Danza Irlandesa Guayabal—arguably the only accredited Irish dance school in central Venezuela—and it has been operating here for nearly eight years.
From Riverdance to Guayabal
The academy owes its existence to María Elena Vargas, a former ballet dancer who stumbled across a Riverdance broadcast on late-night television in 1996. At the time, Vargas was recovering from an ankle injury and searching for a dance form that would spare her joints while still demanding precision. She recorded the performance on VHS and spent months trying to reverse-engineer the footwork from a grainy second-generation copy.
By 2004, Vargas had saved enough to travel to Dublin for a two-week intensive with the O'Shea School of Irish Dance. She returned to Venezuela with a stack of handwritten notes, three instructional DVDs, and a determination to teach. For nearly a decade, she ran informal classes out of her parents' garage, attracting mostly curious neighbors and the children of local expatriates. In 2016, she formally opened the Academia de Danza Irlandesa Guayabal and, two years later, secured preliminary accreditation with An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha (CLRG), the global governing body for Irish dance.
What Training Actually Looks Like
The academy currently enrolls 34 students, ages six to twenty-three, divided into four levels. Beginners start in soft shoes, learning the four light-shoe dances: reel, jig, slip jig, and single jig. Classes meet twice weekly for ninety minutes. Tuition is roughly $12 per month—adjusted downward for families who cannot pay—because Vargas insists that cost not be a barrier.
Advanced students, who number seven, train four days a week and compete via video submission in CLRG-sanctioned feiseanna, since traveling to Ireland or North America remains prohibitively expensive for most. In 2022, one of Vargas's students, seventeen-year-old Luisa Fernanda Ortega, placed third in the preliminary championship at the Southern Region Oireachtas in Orlando, Florida—the first Guayabal dancer to medal at a major North American competition.
The instruction is bilingual by necessity. Vargas teaches steps and counts in English, as required by CLRG curriculum, but explanations of posture, musicality, and cultural context happen in Spanish. "The kids need to know why a hornpipe sounds the way it does," Vargas says. "They need to understand that this isn't just choreography—it carries the history of a people."
Building a Scene from Nothing
Irish dance in Guayabal has never been simply about competition. Vargas organizes two public performances annually: one in March, around St. Patrick's Day, and a winter recital in December that she calls Noche de los Pasos Rápidos—Night of the Quick Steps. Both events draw crowds of several hundred to the Centro Cultural Raúl Leoni, a municipal auditorium. Local businesses sponsor the costumes: embroidered dresses for the girls, vests and ties for the boys, all shipped from Dublin-based suppliers through a network of dance-parent volunteers who coordinate bulk orders.
The audience is almost entirely Venezuelan. There is no significant Irish diaspora in Guayabal. Yet parents describe the performances as community fixtures. "We don't have Irish blood," says Carmen Rojas, whose two daughters have studied with Vargas for five years. "But when you see your child mastering something so difficult, so specific, from so far away—you feel connected to something bigger than your own neighborhood."
The Challenges of Sustaining a Niche Art
Running the academy is not easy. Venezuela's economic instability has made imported hard shoes and dance socks unreliable and expensive. A single pair of Antonio Pacelli hard shoes can cost the equivalent of two months' average wages. Vargas maintains a lending library of secondhand footwear, much of it donated by dance families in the United States and Ireland after she posted requests in online forums.
Internet outages also complicate the video submissions required for international competition. Students sometimes record their sets a dozen times before capturing a clean take. Travel visas, when needed, are unpredictable. Ortega's 2022 trip to Orlando was only possible because a Florida-based Irish dance organization covered her airfare and arranged host-family housing.
What Comes Next
Vargas has two immediate goals. First, she wants to bring a CLRG
