Maeve Donnelly still counts out her reel on the basement stairs some mornings—an old habit from when she started at age twelve. Now fifteen, she checks her turnout angles on SlowFeet, a video-analysis app, before lacing up her hard shoes for Saturday class at the McGowan School of Irish Dance. The basement stairs haven't gone anywhere. But in the three years since she first learned a light jig, nearly everything else about training in this unincorporated Belmont County community has shifted.
From Mirrors to Screens—and Back Again
Irish dance instruction in Neffs has always been resourceful. For decades, teachers relied on plywood stages, boom-box metronomes, and the unforgiving eye of a wall-length mirror. The pandemic forced a hasty pivot to Zoom, and some of those changes stuck. Today, several local schools use slow-motion video review and occasional online masterclasses with Dublin-based adjudicators to supplement in-person teaching.
The McGowan School experimented last winter with a single VR headset designed to simulate a crowded stage. Instructor Siobhán McGowan is candid about the results. "It helped two of our older boys with stage fright," she says, "but most students still prefer the mirror and a live pianist. The technology is interesting. It isn't replacing anything yet."
What has spread widely is more modest: wearable jump-height trackers, cloud-based music libraries with variable tempos, and apps like SlowFeet that let students compare their foot placement frame-by-frame against championship footage. These tools don't make headlines, but they have quietly narrowed the distance between a small Ohio studio and the global circuit.
A Post-Pandemic Performance Boom
If the training floor has evolved gradually, the stage has rebounded dramatically. In March, eight McGowan dancers traveled to Chicago for the Midwest Oireachtas, the regional qualifier for the World Irish Dance Championships. Two advanced to the recall round—the school's best showing since 2019. That qualification earned them invitations to Glasgow in 2025, a first for Neffs.
Local demand has grown in kind. The Ohio Valley Celtic Festival, held each September in nearby St. Clairsville, expanded its Irish dance showcase from one afternoon to a full weekend in 2023 and kept that format this year. Neffs itself hosted its inaugural Feis Neamh—a beginning-level competition—in a borrowed parish hall last November. Eighty dancers from four states showed up. Organizers narrowly ran out of parking.
Digital performance has found a place, too, but a more measured one than boosterish predictions once suggested. The McGowan School live-streamed its winter recital for grandparents in Kerry and Cork, drawing about 120 remote viewers. "It's not a replacement for the theater," McGowan notes. "It's a way to keep the diaspora in the room."
Roots Before Reels
For the serious dancers, Irish dance is athletic craft. For the community, it functions as living heritage. Several Neffs-area schools have expanded their curricula beyond steps and choreography into structured history units: the evolution of sean-nós dance, the significance of the piper's chair in session culture, the political suppression of Irish-language céilí gatherings in the nineteenth century.
At the McGowan School, beginners now spend one class per month on scéalta—short folklore sessions led by a rotating group of local musicians and storytellers. The goal, McGowan says, is to prevent the dance from becoming "gymnastics in a curly wig."
Outreach has extended that mission outward. Dancers from three local schools perform free demonstrations at Belmont County senior centers each spring, and an annual "try-it" workshop at the Immaculate Conception parish hall draws between thirty and fifty children who might never enroll formally. The numbers are modest. The repeat attendance—roughly forty percent—suggests the connections are sticking.
What Comes Next
The Irish dance community in Neffs faces the same pressures as any small-town arts ecosystem: rising travel costs, competition for students' time, and the chronic challenge of retaining teenage boys in the sport. But the post-pandemic years have also brought unexpected advantages. Remote adjudication and digital archives have democratized access to elite feedback. A generation of dancers who learned patience during lockdowns now approaches the grueling World Championship circuit with unusual focus.
There is no technology that replaces the sound of hard shoes striking a sprung floor, and no app that manufactures the particular silence before a solo hornpipe begins. The future of Irish dance in Neffs, Ohio, will likely look much like its past: a stubborn blend of innovation and ritual, performed by young people who happened to grow up somewhere the rest of the world rarely notices.
Sláinte!
