Oireachtas 2014

As a kid, a fellow Irish dancing friend of mine would constantly talk about Oireachtas, and I always listened in fascination and a bit of envy, since I didn't think I would ever be good enough to make it. Doing only two feiseanna a year definitely doesn't help you move up the ranks. So it was to my complete delight that my teacher asked me to join our school's ceili team to compete, and oh, by the way, do some solo dancing via trad set. Of course I said yes even though it's at a pretty terrible time of year for anyone that doesn't live in their hometown and had to travel for Thanksgiving.

To get to Philly for the Mid-Atlantic regionals I ended up having to take two different buses, and of course one I arrived I saw a sign for what could have been a direct bus for me. At least I managed to arrive in Philly at the same time as my boyfriend, who was coming to support me.

[I should also mention that prior to Oireachtas, I had only done 2 other feiseanna, neither of which he went to. Meaning that the complete insanity that is Oireachtas was his very first experience into the world of competitive Irish dance. He is obviously a total champ for surviving the experience!]

Our teams managed to snag a pretty sweet spot in one of the public practice rooms - way better than the private rooms since we had an actual floor to use. Luckily at that point in the weekend most of the kids had already danced, so there wasn't too much awkward sharing. And on Sunday the room was almost exclusively students from our school (youths and adults).

I spent a decent amount of time, pretty much every moment we weren't practicing our ceilis, practicing my trad set. When we were signed up for Oireachtas I had only just started learning Garden of Daisies, and by Oireachtas time I had only finished learning it about a week and a half before. Talk about nerve wracking!

Also nerve wracking? Seeing the number of competitors. It's one thing to see 66 names written down, it's another entirely to see all 66 people (or, in this case, 63 - a few dropped out) getting lined up and herded in the ballroom. And then finding out that they're starting with the number a few after yours, meaning you're going pretty much dead last.

The other downside to this, beyond the obvious, was that I couldn't even watch the other dancers doing sets I had never seen (which, to be fair, is most of them) because I was so paranoid I was going to get confused and mess up the steps to my own set. The 40 versions of St. Patrick's Day didn't help either.

Since the ceilis were delayed because of trad sets (some genius scheduled adult trad sets for 66 dancers at 3:30pm and adult ceilis at 4pm), we ended up having a lot of time to kill before our competition finally went up, which mainly consisted of standing around talking and pretending to practice. As we were hanging out in the hallway, a couple of younger girls (probably around 13 and 16) walked by, trying to see if there was anything good to watch in the ballrooms. As they peeked in our ballroom, the older girl says dismissively, "Oh, these are the old people." Um, excuse me?! Old people?! This is gonna be you someday, sweetheart!

And you know what? For a bunch of "old people," there was some serious competition. While waiting to go on for our 8-hand, we saw our rankings skipping after every team we watched: "Ok, so we'll get 2nd... [next team] Well, ok, maybe 3rd... [yet another team goes] Ok, I guess we're getting 4th!"

While I completely expected the high level of competition (if we were busting our asses for months on end, it was guaranteed that other teams were as well), I was definitely not expecting the sheer number of teams. For the ladies 8-hand there were 9 teams, and for the ladies 4-hand, a whopping 23! Regardless of what the regular competition circuit looked like to me throughout the year, adults at least mean serious business for Oireachtas.

Again, there were delays for adults (our teams were just finishing up dinner when they announced they were going to call awards for adult ceilis). By the time we ran up to the ballroom, they had decided to skip us and move onto the kids' ceili awards. It had clearly been a very long time since I'd been around any significant amount of elementary and middle schoolers, because my ear drums were not at all prepared for the bloodcurdling screams of large numbers of under-12s.

And for the results: all of our teams placed, and all but one of us doing trad set placed. Our mixed team came in first for both 4- and 8-hand, bringing home some pretty sweet trophies (I jokingly suggested they celebrate their wins by Stanley Cup-ing it). For me, my 4-hand team came in 6th, my 8-hand team came in 4th, and I came in 6th for my trad set!

All in all it was a great weekend, and I'm really looking forward to doing even better next year!

Some additional random things:

Across the street from the hotel Oireachtas was at is another hotel which at the same time was hosting a chess championship tournament. Oh, the matchmaking opportunities that could have happened...

It was pretty funny picking out all of the dancers at the Liberty Bell and other historical sites. The employees at all of these places seemed pretty used to it by the end of the weekend.