Hello everybody, and welcome to the blog!

My name is Aleks and I am, apparently, an Irish Dancer. I started dancing in one of the Belgrade Irish dance companies – Erin’s Fiddle – in 2009 at the “tender” age of 23. Fast forward a few years and there I was running between the backstage and the sound people and recording footage for our video archive. Most significantly, I wrote and co-directed two stage shows with the team – Erindol and Ritam Grada.

As we were spending Sundays in T-Pub (gone but not forgotten! also reincarnated), which was hosting weekly Irish Nights, a Session scene began to emerge and I found myself very excited to work with the musicians and improvise steps to the tunes. Soon enough I started ordering DVDs and learning sean-nós (somehow I also ended up having two bodhrans and a concertina in my place but that’s a different story). After adding a brush dance to our performances, we created a small (but crazy!) sean-nós group in Erin’s Fiddle where I was sharing what I learned. Looking for workshops ended up bringing us to Prague, where we’ve been attending Bernard’s Summer School since 2016. From that point I’ve been doing as much traveling as I can – always enjoy meeting new people and getting new inspirations!

At the end of 2019 I got curious about old-style dancing – again learning from videos since, much like sean-nós, it’s really hard to find teachers or workshops nearby. I was just about to re-start teaching in EF as part of a “non-competitive” class that would deal with different traditional forms of Irish Dance but… we got COVID-19. There did happen to be a silver lining, as suddenly a number of online workshops in old-style started popping up that are really working great for me.

I created this blog in 2014 to share some of my stories and memories but, as you may have noticed, it’s been a fairly irregular thing up to now. Will that ever change? Who knows! Either way, I hope the writings here give you some interesting ideas and inspire you to learn more about this incredible dance and culture and keep you moving on your own dancing journey. Looking forward to meeting you in the comments section!