FAYETTEVILLE — In the chorus line of a dozen girls of all heights performing intricate, high-stepping Irish dance moves, little Audra Graves stood out as the tiniest dancer of them all.
The blond, Central Park Elementary second-grader held her own with the older girls in making the traditional dance look effortless, and maintained a broad, ear-toear grin while continuously making eye contact with the audience.
As they performed high kicks and other maneuvers, the Irish dancers’ voluminous corkscrew curls bobbed and sprang in a mesmerizing fashion.
Audra, 8, was the youngest performer in the troupefrom McCafferty School of Irish Dance that gave a demonstration during Saturday’s four-hour, interactive “Day of Dance” event at Northwest Arkansas Mall in Fayetteville, while her sister Alyssa was the oldest at 17.
After the performance, Audra said of all the dance steps in the routines that day, the “light jig” was the most difficult for her while the “reel step” was the easiest.
“Normally it doesn’t go as fast as it did today,” Audra said of the jig. “It’s usually slower. That’s what makes it hard.”
Later, Audra tried the zumba along with other audience members but thought “it was just kind of silly.”
Audra and Alyssa Graves of Benton County wereamong 55 performers ages 5 to 65 who showed their stuff at the event, where dance styles ranged from jazz, tap, lyrical, hip-hop and African drum-and-dance, to swing, salsa and belly dancing.
Day of Dance (For Your Health), sponsored by Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, was among 80 such heart-healthy “Day of Dance” community events held around the country Saturday.
In Fayetteville, more than a dozen dance troupes and others who fielded dance teams - a senior center and the hospital’s own Center for Exercise - led Saturday’s morning and afternoon sessions.
After each group demonstrated one or more dances, the audience was invited to the stage to learn a few dance steps from the dancers.
“Come on - one more! I want to see more people moving,” said an instructor for Washington Regional’s exercise center, Natalia Pizarro, as she led intrepid audience members in some bold zumba gyrations while wearing a headset microphone.
“There’s no right and wrong here,” Pizarro said with a broad smile. “It’s your own style.”
When the “Off Our Rockers” group from the Fayetteville Senior Activity and Wellness Center stepped to the stage, they taught some in the audience a thing or two about the line dance, to some honky-tonk music.
Gina Rankin of Fayetteville watched happily whileone elderly woman from the audience, sporting a purple pantsuit and large square glasses, showed plenty of pizzazz.
“She’s getting down!” Rankin, who was there to watch her 9-year-old daughter Zoe perform, exclaimed to a friend while watching the woman join the stepping throngs of the lime-shirted Off Our Rockers folks.
After the Irish dance group performed the four dance routines she had choreographed, Ana Ayala of Fayetteville, an assistant instructor at the McCafferty dance school, led the audience participation coda.
Ayala, 25, said the four routines included a reel, a hornpipe and a treble reel, the one dance where the girls wore hard shoes. For the others, they wore soft shoes, called “ghillies.”
“The second was a fourhand reel, an official, traditional figure dance - or ceile,” said Ayala, a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville journalism graduate. “The third was a hornpipe - all one word - that was performed by our older girls who’ve reached championship level in competition.”
Ayala is of Hispanic heritage. She discovered Irish dance at age 14 while attending Trinity Junior High in Fort Smith. She watched another girl perform it during a multicultural fair at the school.
“Just the rhythm and ... the hard shoes. It just sounded really cool,” said Ayala, who now works a day job as a recruiter for UA’s Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and moonlights at McCafferty teaching dance. “I competedfor many, many years.”
While Ayala was teaching the audience Saturday, Mary Lily of Fayetteville stepped to the stage to join in, with her 8-month-old daughter Opal Clark, going along for the ride in her mother’s front sling.
Afterward, Lily said, shetagged along behind her 4-year-old, Rosa Clark, who wanted to try the Irish dancing but soon became overwhelmed by it and dropped out.
“It’s a bit complex for her,” she said, though Rosa does take classes already covering world dance, break-dancing and Filipino stick dance. “The class she’s taking is really helping her to focus on something.”
Audra Graves was among those who could be called a natural performer, one who makes the difficult seem easy.
But there were plenty of other moments that also charmed the audience. Some dancers were just plain old “hams.” There also were a few flubs, and some times where one could read a young performer’s face and know by a worried look or a concentrated stare at the ground that their mastery of a tricky step was taking some mental effort, or that an intricate set of moves was coming up.
Audra said she began taking Irish dance lessons around three years ago, after seeing her sister Alyssa do so.
Alyssa Graves recalled that it began for her when she saw a PBS documentary on Irish dance several years ago.
“I was so inspired,” Alyssa said. She checked out a videotape at the public library and began slowing the tape down so she get learn the moves.
“Then I found out I could take a class here,” she said of the McCafferty school.
Dancing has given her a window into Irish culture.
“It’s become one of my passions,” Alyssa said. “It’s one of my releases after a long day.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 17 on 02/27/2011