*Ciara Beech.
A GORT ballet teacher’s commitment and dedication to ballet were commended with an award last weekend, describing it as a “penny-drop kind of moment”.
By Dearbhla Parry
Ciara Beech of Ciara Beech Dance Academy won an award for excellence in ballet on Saturday at the Golden Dance Awards Ireland in Castleknock Hotel, Dublin. The excellence in ballet award reflects the recognition of the dance school’s outstanding commitment, dedication, and excellence within ballet.
“It was mainly down to the parents of my students saying nice things”, explained Ciara about the nominations read by the organisation’s six judges.
Ciara’s dance school is a one-teacher academy founded in 2014, the classes have run for eleven years in Gort and three in Portumna. The school originally started with only twelve students now has a total of 120 to 130 dancers. “It’s been a real story of perseverance and hard work”, said Ciara, who has been teaching since 2009. With this award, she hopes that her school will be “put on the map” and said, “It just basically confirmed that what I am doing is right. We’ve finally got to a place where I believed the school would always get to”.
Founded by Catherine Hughes and Danielle Hughes Quinn, the Golden Dance Awards Ireland aim to celebrate the efforts and achievements of dance schools, studio owners, teachers, choreographers, dancers, and anyone else involved in the diverse community of dance.
A child-centred and holistic teaching style is the core of Ciara’s classes. Two main lessons she hopes to teach her students are that “they are seen, they matter, and their uniqueness is their gift to the world” and that “hard work beats talent”. She creates a positive space with expectations varying depending on each individual child. She said, “I celebrate all the wins for a child, no matter how big or small, because they’re all big wins to that particular child.”
“I take the role of being a consistent, responsible adult in their life very seriously. My number one goal is that a child walks out of my class feeling happier than when they walked in”.
Despite moving around a lot as a child, Ciara danced for most of her life with the help of her mother, who made sure that she was always in some type of class. After moving back to Ireland, at the age of twelve Ciara found Corrib Dance Academy in Galway, where teacher Phyllis Hayes recommended she take up ballet to improve her jazz and modern technique. With her vocational ballet exams done and with what Phyllis noticed as a natural teaching ability, she recommended that Ciara pursue the teaching career path. “It just completely flipped my world upside down”, she admitted. Following Phyllis’ advice, she auditioned for dance colleges in England and has been following that journey since, with qualifications with the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) and Imperial Society of Teacher and Dance (ISTD) to teach ballet, modern dance, jazz, modern theatre, and tap. Ciara said, “I thought I was going to be a psychologist and maybe a writer, then this whole world of opportunity opened up to me.”
The winner of the award showed gratitude to her parents for driving her to classes as a child and for helping her through dance college in the UK. She also thanks Phyllis for being her mentor and friend. Ciara said, “She really saw something in me that I didn’t really see in myself. I have a lot to owe her.”
As well as the difficulties of a self-employed company, Ciara explained that she has to conform to being a “jack of all trades”. A teacher, choreographer, administrator, social media guru, and costume designer are just some of the jobs that she has had to learn and undertake within her school. However, the toughest part of being a dance teacher, according to Ciara, is saying goodbye when a student decides to leave. Whether they naturally leave or leave before Ciara feels they have reached their full potential, she calls it “heartbreaking” and “difficult” saying goodbye. But, she commented, “For all of the small negatives, the positives really outweigh the negatives, and I’m so lucky that I do this job”.
“Ballet is changing for the positive”, stated Ciara about the evolution of the dance style over time. It has become a world welcoming of different body types and races. The Gort teacher appeared positive about where ballet is headed in terms of inclusivity, saying, “The very tall, very thin image isn’t what people are striving for anymore, thankfully.” She went on, “Literally all bodies can do ballet, regardless of disabilities. There’s no such thing as a disability in ballet; We embrace every type of body and every type of human”.
However, she also worries about people viewing dangerous techniques on social media. She feels that over the past 30 years, higher jumps, higher leg extensions, bendier backs, and over splits are “pushing the limits of human capabilities”. After posting, “they might need weeks of physio after they’ve done that one thing”, she explained. “They’re not being a really healthy picture of what dance is.” She stated, “Dance is not a series of pictures, it’s about what happens between the pictures.”
