The BA Irish Dance is a four-year, full-time undergraduate programme designed to develop your dance skills and knowledge of your practice, as well as to include other forms of musical and artistic expression. As a student you will spend extensive studio time developing technique and repertoire in the world-class dance studios at the Academy. You will also be able to develop your scholarly knowledge and enquiry around your own discipline and genre. Importantly, you will be introduced to other performance practices and scholarly traditions in order to gain new insights into the worlds of dance and the performing arts, enhancing your creative potential. You will also study a number of vocationally focused modules aimed at allowing you to translate your artistic and scholarly creativity into a fulfilling career.

The first year of the course is the common entry programme shared with all the pathways (Irish Music, Irish Dance, Contemporary Dance, Voice and World Music). However you focus from the start of this first year is on your own performance practice. In first year, you will focus and develop your own Irish dance practice and be introduced to critical academic engagement with classical, popular, traditional, contemporary, world music and dance through a performative lens.

From second year onwards, you will focus on Irish Dance. Students will undertake additional specialist modules in Irish music and dance studies, dance studies, experiential anatomy and movement analysis, as well as dance pedagogy.

Students will work in the development of their technique and repertoire in a context that concentrates on the students as the site and main agent for creativity. These classes are led by the renowned faculty and tutors at the Irish World Academy with contributions from many visiting tutors from a number of different dance practices. Students will have many classes relating to their well-being as dancers such as yoga, pilates, movement awareness and sessions with the world class physiotherapy facilities and staff at the University of Limerick.

As a student, you will be based at the world-class facilities of the Irish World Academy building, equipped to the highest standards with cutting edge performance and rehearsal spaces and technological infrastructure. Tuition is provided by a faculty of excellent performers and academics, as well as industry professionals and international guest artists and researchers.

The programme prepares you for many different career paths including professional performance; further study; work in cultural institutions; media related posts; archival work; performance production; portfolio careers combining the preceding and others in entrepreneurial ways.

Your future career

Professional Performance
Further Study (MA, PhD)
Music/Dance Therapy
Community Music/Dance
Music/Dance teacher
Arts administration
Performance management and promotion
Backstage work in performance theatre e.g. sound engineer
Music Technology, e.g. recording studio producer/technician
Media (TV, Radio etc.)
Work in cultural institutions and archives