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A Calgary dancer has received high honors at an elite worldwide Irish dance competitors.
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Mackenzie Mahler completed in first place within the senior ladies’s class on the World Irish Dance Championships, held in Montreal final week.
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It is a victory that Calgarian says is the end result of a lifetime’s work. She mentioned she hopes the achievement can present others how laborious, constant work pays off.
“Dancers apply and dance and apply six or seven days per week, 20 hours, generally extra per week, all for this world championship title,” says Mahler, who has been dancing since she was six.
“It is an intense setting, extremely aggressive. Folks dedicate every thing they’ve for this title. There is no cash concerned in profitable or something, it is all for the love of it.”
Aggressive Irish dancing is similar to determine skating, Mahler mentioned, by way of the person efficiency and judging features of high-end occasions.
Event placings are introduced in reverse order, making for a tense reveal as rivals hope they do not hear their identify known as till the top of the checklist. For Mahler, the victory was much more shocking as a result of she was nonetheless recovering from a flu contracted earlier than the competitors when she took the stage.
“It was truthfully so surreal,” mentioned Mahler, who dances with the Blakey O’Brien Irish Dance Faculty in Calgary.
“It was simply superb to take a seat there with my lecturers and all the opposite dancers and their mother and father from our college and my mother and father… It is simply the most effective feeling ever, and sharing it with everybody simply made it higher.”
This yr’s World Irish Dance Championships passed off on Canadian soil, however most years they happen in Eire or elsewhere in Europe.
Rivals at this yr’s occasion traveled to Montreal from as far-off as Australia, Mahler mentioned.
jherring@postmedia.com
Twitter: @jasonfherring
