When the McNamara School of Irish Dance moved into its expanded studio on Front Street last January, owner Fiona Brennan scheduled back-to-back open houses just to manage the overflow of prospective students. The waiting list for beginner classes now stretches into autumn. In a city of roughly 13,000, that kind of demand signals something more enduring than a seasonal trend.
Irish dance in Millersburg has spent generations as a quiet fixture of community life—taught in church basements, performed at county festivals, passed down through families with County Cork or Kerry roots. What has changed in the past several years, and accelerated through 2024, is how local schools and performers are treating that heritage less as a museum piece and more as a living, elastic art form.
From Parish Halls to Spotlights
The technical foundation remains intact: the rigid upper body, the rapid-fire footwork, the jig and reel structures that competitive dancers drill for years. But watch a performance by Millersburg's Reel Roots company, and you will also see contemporary ballet lines, hip-hop isolations, and even taptrading sequences choreographed by founder Declan Moore, who returned to the city in 2022 after dancing with a touring company in Dublin.
Moore's piece "Crossings," which debuted at the Millersburg Cultural Center in April, paired six hard-shoe dancers with a cellist and a spoken-word artist tracing local Irish immigrant history. It sold out two nights and drew attendees from as far as Columbus and Pittsburgh. Brennan, whose own school emphasizes a more traditional competition track, says she encourages students to attend these fusion performances. "They need to see where the form can travel," she said. "Not everyone will compete at Worlds. Some will choreograph, or teach, or adapt it into theater. That's still carrying the tradition forward."
The Digital Question
Conversations about Irish dance's evolution inevitably turn to technology, but in Millersburg the digital shift has been uneven. No local school is currently producing virtual-reality performances, and instructors push back against the idea that online tutorials can replace in-person instruction for a form so dependent on precise foot placement and posture.
Where technology has genuinely expanded reach is in documentation and connection. Reel Roots livestreams its annual showcase, and last March's broadcast drew roughly 1,200 viewers—triple the theater's physical capacity. TikTok and Instagram have also allowed younger dancers to build followings: seventeen-year-old competitive dancer Maeve O'Connor, who trains with Brennan, has accumulated nearly 50,000 followers by posting slow-motion clips of complex treble sequences and explaining the mechanics behind them. "It's not about replacing the stage," O'Connor said. "It's about showing people why the stage matters."
Curricula That Look Beyond Steps
Several Millersburg schools have reshaped their programming to root technical training in cultural literacy. At the McNamara School, advanced students now complete a unit on the city's Irish Consolidated Benevolent Society, the mutual-aid organization that sponsored the first documented ceilís in Millersburg in 1887. They also study the musical structures that govern competitive sets, learning to identify when a hornpipe shifts meter and how that change should shape their timing.
Eamon McNamara, Fiona Brennan's uncle and the school's founder before her, initially resisted adding classroom-style history lessons. He has since revised his view. "We were producing dancers who could win medals but couldn't tell you why the dance existed," he said. "That gap started to bother me."
Opening the Floor
Accessibility has become the most deliberate priority for Millersburg's Irish dance community. Brennan's school now offers a seated hard-shoe class for students with mobility differences, emphasizing percussive footwork and arm movements performed from chairs or walkers. The class, launched in 2023 with guidance from a local physical therapist, has seven regular participants ranging in age from twelve to sixty-four.
Reel Roots partners with the Holmes County Board of Developmental Disabilities to host quarterly adaptive workshops, and Moore is currently working with a grant from the Ohio Arts Council to develop choreography that incorporates American Sign Language interpretation into performance. "Inclusivity isn't a charity effort," Moore said. "It's about recognizing that this dance belongs to anyone who wants to engage with it."
What Comes Next
Millersburg's Irish dance calendar runs densely through 2024. The McNamara School will host its annual feis in August at the Knisely Center, with an expected 400 competitors from across the Midwest. Reel Roots is scheduled to premiere a new full-length work in November at the Rialto Theater. And in October, for the first time, the city's Irish Heritage Festival will include a crossover event pairing local dancers with bluegrass musicians—a collaboration that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
Whether through aerial silks, ASL-integrated choreography, or TikTok tutorials, the
