World champion dances on streets for fleadh week

By Ciara O'Hara

Four-time World Irish Dancing Champion Zofia Bielicka was busking on Pearse Street all week. Zofia danced for up to six hours daily, for stints of roughly an hour or an hour-and-a-half, taking breaks in between. “I think the most I did last year with one of my friends was two hours, because it gets tiring after a while,” she said.

Zofia has been dancing for 11 years and started when she was “nearly five years old”.

“I’ve grown up doing the Irish dancing,” she told the Westmeath Examiner. The style that she performs is called ‘Solo Irish Dancing’. “It’s a little bit more modern than the traditional set-dancing, but it’s still derived from the original,” said Zofia.

Born and raised in Ireland, Zofia’s parents are from Poland, so she is the first person in her family to ever learn Irish dancing. A member of the Emerald Lakes Academy in Rochfortbridge, Zofia competes internationally and at all-Irelands.

She has won the World Irish Dancing Championships four times, in 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023. She has also been Irish Open Champion three times, British Open Champion three times and Scottish Open Champion twice.

“I haven’t really competed at fleadhs because fleadhs are more traditional and team competitions. I mostly compete solo, but the fleadh is brilliant for busking and showing people what the Irish dance is like. The Gig Rig as well is great because my whole dance school does that,” said Zofia.

She had lots of fans gathering to watch her, and is enjoying the buzz of the fleadh, especially the young spectators who join in and dance with her. “It’s brilliant and we were here last year as well… The town’s packed.

“The little kids are brilliant and they’ll come up and they’ll do a few steps and a jump and a skip and, you know, it’s great. One of my old schoolteachers came down with his kids and they got up and they did a little step with me so it was really nice,” she said.

Zofia attended Gainstown National School and is now going into sixth year at St Finian’s College. After the Leaving Certificate, she hopes to study medicine. “But if not, I’d probably take a year off. Possibly do something with the dancing; there are loads of companies now, big, small, that do performances all over Ireland and all over the world.”

She was inspired to take up Irish dancing after seeing it on TV and thinking, ‘That looks really cool!’

Her granny encouraged Zofia’s parents to enrol her in classes, telling them: “Oh, you’re in Ireland; you might as well sign her up to do something that’s really like local that you would get anywhere else in the world.”

“Although Irish dancing is global now, it’s still mostly focused in Ireland. So my parents signed me up for classes and I’ve been at it ever since,” said Zofia. Her Polish family have all come to watch and support her at various competitions and events over the years.

She spends about 20 hours a week practising, “and that includes fitness training”. “It does require a lot of fitness, even when you look at the competition dancing. People would be surprised at how demanding it actually is. The top dancers are all super fit. They’re super-fit performance athletes and people don’t realise it because they think it’s this art form that’s kind of forgotten, but then you bring them to a competition and they’re like, woah!”

She finds that dancing and competing help her to focus on her academic studies. “I have to be really good with my time management. Like, if I want to go to training or something, I need to have all my homework finished, so it definitely forces that time management, but it’s really good because I have to focus on school and then focus on dancing… I do ballet as well so that definitely helps and I used to do gymnastics. It’s all kind of linked,” she said.

After the fun of the fleadh, Zofia headed to a two-week intensive Riverdance Summer School in Dublin. “There’s about 120 students. We’ll be learning the choreography from the show; we’ll be working with instructors who are the professional dancers themselves. At the end, we do a showcase to show all the dances and we get to perform all the pieces from the show, so that’s really exciting, and a few dancers are chosen then to perform in the matinee… They do the final number, which is called Riverdance,” said Zofia.

Zofia’s mother Agnes is “very proud” of Zofia’s achievements and of her dedication. Agnes told the Westmeath Examiner that playing an instrument or competing at a high-level benefits children academically too. “They learn that they need to work hard to get to where they want to be,” said Agnes.

Zofia enjoys losing herself in dance: “I can be at it for hours and hours on end, just practising, drilling steps and getting everything down to perfection.”