World Championship glory for Tipperary dance school students

​​Twenty students from Clonmel-based dance school AOK-DANCE had an “amazing experience” at the Dance World Cup as part of Team Ireland, which this year took place on home soil, making it all the more special.

There is now cause for more celebrations for the school, as dance student Kyle came home from the competition a World Champion with his ballet solo, “Journey”. This was an “unbelieveable” achievement for Kyle, where he broke boundaries as a male dancer performing en pointe. 

The competition takes place every summer, and this year it came to Ireland for the first time, taking place in the Convention Centre, Dublin over the course of 11 days in July.

The competition involved almost 14,000 dancers from 60 different countries and is often referred to as the "Olympics of Dance”, with each country having only five spots available per age group and category.

This year, the school had ten entries qualified for the Dance World Cup.

Among them were four team performances: a younger group performing ‘Children of the War’, an older group performing ‘Can You Help Me?’, and the combined groups performing ‘Survive’ in the commercial section, and ‘Lost’ in the lyrical section. There were two duets from the school, from Nylah and Kate with  their contemporary duet ‘Force’, and Kyle and Sophie performed their duet, ‘Toxic’.

AOK-DANCE is based in Clonmel, and is owned and run by Aoife O’Keeffe who praised the young performers: "Both did fantastic, and scored extremely high, with the latter placing ninth in the world.”

There were also four solos from the school: Lily Mae performed her ballet solo ‘Once Upon a Dream’, while Kyle had three solos, all of which scored exceptionally high: his acro solo ‘Freddy’s Coming For You’ which finished fourth (only fractions of a point behind second), his lyrical solo ‘Hurt With You’ which finished an incredible second with a silver medal, and finally his ballet solo ‘Journey’ which got the gold award and the title of World Champion.

Speaking with The Nationalist, Aoife said that the competition was an “amazing” experience for the dancers.

"All four team performances were superb, full of emotion and story-telling, all performed with pride and excellence, and receiving amazing scores, along with so much great feedback from different international schools”.

“Being part of the event was such an honour, having already gone through the Irish qualifiers over four days earlier in the year, along with over a thousand entries from around the country, competing for the limited number of spots on Team Ireland in the Dance World Cup.

"Even being part of the qualifiers was an achievement in itself, as lots of entries had to go through video auditions just to make it as far as the qualifiers.”

Following on from the party atmosphere of the opening ceremony in the 3Arena, the competition itself was “an amazing experience for all students.”

"They got to compete against the best of the best from around the world,” explained Aoife. 

"For these twenty students, being part of this event, and performing on the world stage against the best dancers in the world was such a rewarding and memorable experience that they will ever forget,” said Aoife. 

“I’m grateful to all parents, families and supporters, as well as all sponsors who helped cover the costs of such a huge event, and to all of the students who worked so hard, and represented Clonmel and Ireland with pride”.