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Here's  a little history. 

Dancing has been around for thousands of years, starting with primitive man dancing around bonfires to celebrate events in life, honor gods, plead for water, thank the sun, who knows what else. The most common dance form was in a line or circle, and even though the motives have changed, this form has remained. Our dances are now done for the shear pleasure of moving to music. Jigs were the earliest dance tune in Ireland, reels and hornpipes then grew in popularity as well as polkas. The sets we dance today were derived from the 18th century cotillions in France. These were court dances where four couples started in a square formation. They danced a procession at the beginning, a figure during a second period of music with title such as les ronds, la grande chaine, les moulinets,( I will return to these terms later) then they returned to their own positions. Like dance styles we have today, they remain popular for a while then people get bored with them. When the cotillions lost their popularity though, many of the formations were applied to a new dance style started in the 19th century known as quadrilles. A quadrille is a troops of horsemen who form a square when taking part in a tournament. In the days of Napoleon I it became the most popular dance with several complicated figures, usually danced in sets of four, five and six figures as are the sets of today. In those days, France was the capital of style, food, clothing etc, so whatever was done there, was then brought to the rest of western Europe, to keep up with the Jones, so to speak. The Quadrilles are believed to have arrived in Ireland around 1816. Military personnel, diplomats and other travelers of the time came back from the continent and missed the dancing. One troup of dancers in Dublin asked a dance teacher, Mr. Duval, to create a dance for them. In 1817, he created the Lancers Set based on one of the renown Quadrilles known by the same name. The dances were danced by the upper class but spread rapidly among the ordinary people. Dance masters traveled the country offering their services in the various towns, usually with a fiddler or piper. The dance masters often adapted the steps to the ability of his pupils and the style of music, so some variety started to develop. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were about a dozen different sets, now there are hundreds. (after the first figure, explain the last figure was called Les Lanciers, imitating the advance and formation of a lancers unit. It also has the movement known as La grande chaine, where everyone chains around