Dancers ZOOMing through the Pandemic

Irish Dancing has a vast competition circuit which runs from local competitions to global championships. Dancers on the circuit often form strong bonds over the years at these competitions.

There are stories of dancers who formed friendships at the young age of 5 at a beginner competition and later became college roommates.  Or the two friends who went head to head in competitions that now are the best of friends on the professional show circuit. And, then there are the stories of friendships that have lasted decades which all began at a "feis" pronounced "fesh," which is an Irish word commonly used to refer to Irish Dance competitions. Competitive dance provides participants an outlet to form friendships that often last for decades. 

For dancers on the competition circuit, the pandemic may have temporarily sidelined seeing each other in person, but it certainly did not sideline the ability to keep friendships growing. Last summer, a group of 11 and 12 year old Champion dancers from nine schools on the East Coast of the USA launched a ZOOM group to keep up with each other's pandemic lives. From the beginning, ZOOM proved an important lifeline for their friendship.

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Hayden Moon, a dancer at the Callanan Academy of Dance in Sydney, Australia, was instrumental in making changes in ensuring that every person involved in Irish Dance is treated with respect and dignity and protected from discrimination, harassment and abuse. This is his story.

From the very first dance class, Irish Dancers are taught to turn out, stay up on toes, and keep arms firmly at their sides. However, the style of dance between the male and female sections in competitive Irish Dance are vastly different.  

Most transgender dancers strive to compete with the gender they identify as and re-learning technique can be challenging. Dancer Hayden Moon originally competed in the women’s competition bracket but later moved to the male section. During this  process, Hayden felt discriminated against by some in the dance community. Today, he feels fully supported by the Callanan Academy but it was quite a complex process getting to this point in his dance career.  

Hayden started Irish Dancing when he was 13 years old, before taking a break a year later and starting again at 18. But it wasn’t until he was 23 that he came out as his true self. “I would cry before competitions because I had to dress as a woman," he says. "I was competing in the senior ladies competition and knowing the whole time that I was a guy."

When Hayden made the decision to dance in the men’s section, he could still keep his feet turned out and his arms by his side, but he had to change many other things about his dancing. Not only was he in a new section, but he had to say goodbye to the ladies’ Irish Dance shoes, also known as pomps or ghillies. The ladies’ shoe is made of soft leather, yet the men’s shoe has a heel, used extensively throughout dancing. "I'd spent years learning to be high on my toes and not make any noise and never let my heel touch the ground, doing all of these very pretty kicks and leaps and jumps. And then all of a sudden I was getting told by my dance teacher that I wasn't loud enough,” he explains.

Slowly, Hayden adapted to the men’s competition style. “I was having to stamp and do clicks and double clicks in my reels. It was all very strange,” he adds. Dancing ceili steps was also a challenge for Hayden, as he found himself accidentally standing in the lady’s spot rather than the gent’s with his hand in the wrong position.  

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