Malverne dancer makes strides in stepdance

Devoting nearly a decade to the sport of Irish Dancing, Julia O’Rourke, 14, a freshman at Sacred Heart Academy, in Hempstead, shared her strategy to stomping out the competition at international stepdance competitions.

“When I go on stage or when I’m dancing, I don’t really think about anything — my mind just completely blanks out,” said O’Rourke, who placed second at this year’s Great Britain Championships in London and All Ireland’s Competition in Belfast, Ireland. “When I’m practicing, I think of all the specific things I have to do, but I have to practice it so that it looks natural on stage. I don’t have time to think about it on stage because I’m too busy smiling.”

Aside from competing in these tournaments for the third time, O’Rourke has nabbed a hefty list of trophies and titles in the last nine years, winning the 2010 world championships and the national and regional championships four times. She said she also competes in feises, or Irish stepdancing competitions, almost every weekend and performs in shows and parades with fellow dancers.

O’Rourke credited her fascination with Irish Dancing to the first moment she watched one of her kindergarten classmates perform a stepdance number for show and tell.

“I’ve loved it from the moment I saw that,” she said.

As a student of the Doherty-Petri School of Irish Dancing in Franklin Square — formerly the Petri School before merging with its sister school, Doherty School of Irish Dancing, in Belfast last summer — O’Rourke said she regularly practices for yearly competitions, but begins rigorous training about a month before. When preparing for this year’s All Ireland’s Competition, she said she practiced at the Doherty School’s studio for two days until 9 p.m. each night.

O’Rourke faced some difficulty while training last summer, she said, after recovering from a back injury that hurt her performance at the stepdancing world championships earlier this year.

Taking a year off from dancing, O’Rourke said she vigorously practiced to bounce back as a major competitor in time for the Great Britain Championships and All Ireland’s Competition last month.

“You just come back into it slowly because you really have to set your mind to it,” she said. “You can’t think that it’ll automatically come back — it’s not any different for me than it would for anyone else.”

O’Rourke is currently preparing to compete at the Irish stepdancing regional competition on Nov. 28 and the All Scotland’s Competition next February.

While she still has plenty of years ahead in her stepdancing career, O’Rourke said she already plans to pursue Irish Dancing throughout high school and later when she moves onto college, eventually wanting to become a dance teacher.