“On a night out, I love a good dance,” Riverdance lead Lauren Smyth admits. Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the Irish dancing world in a way it has never experienced before, it has undergone a digital revolution and seen an unprecedented wave of online activity; from Zoom classes, to video collaborations, virtual camps and worldwide workshops. 33-year-old Lauren Smyth from Newtownards, Northern Ireland, made her mark on the new world of virtual Irish dance via her Instagram page, setting dance challenges, sharing new rhythm combos and even mastering the art of shuffling.
The veteran performer was on the anticipated Riverdance 25th Anniversary tour at the legendary Radio City Music Hall when she heard the news that their tour would be cut short. “Initially we were told that we were just getting sent home for two weeks, so a part of me was kind of relieved,” she laughs. “The tour had been so intense, so a few of us were like ‘Okay, two weeks, rest and re-energise and then come back and we’ll finish off the last few months of the tour.’” But within hours of her arriving back home, she received an email to say the tour had been cancelled. “It kind of hit home. The thought of a lot of time off wasn’t wasn’t as appealing as it first may have seemed.”
In a way every dancer who saw their competitive season come to an abrupt halt can relate, the chance to rest and mentally reset was a somewhat welcome consolation for Lauren. “I think at the start it was important to take the rest, to just chill and just to let our bodies and minds recover from what had been a really intense tour,” she explains. But after a few weeks, she started to get the itch. “Dancing’s been such a massive part of my life for almost 30 years now. So when you haven’t been dancing you start to feel a little off balance. I was like, ‘I need to get back to being myself’. And that’s what kind of led to the start of all the challenges…One small idea just kind of led to something very beautiful.”
Lauren would unknowingly create what would become the first in a series of Instagram dance challenges with her hard shoe piece “Before the Storm Comes”. The routine, which arranged a sequence of crisp hardshoe beats and became so recognisable, you can probably still recite it in your head, wasn’t initially intended to be a challenge. “It was just that day I put my shoes on, and I was like, ‘What am I going to dance? I’m not going to dance Riverdance just yet,” she says with infectious laughter.
She repurposed a treble reel step created backstage on tour and shared it on Instagram. The next day she saw that a dancer from Dublin had posted their own rendition of the step, and a few weeks later, Lauren would watch videos from almost 200 other dancers sharing their interpretations, even reaching as far as Kazakhstan. “It was just unbelievable,” she says. “Before The Storm Comes” would kickstart a series of ten challenges, neatly labelled under the #LaurenSmythChallenge hashtag, keeping dancers busy through a period of unprecedented down time.
“I helped myself through a hard time,” Lauren admits. While she confesses that she had to make herself vulnerable through the process, seeing the growth and confidence of other dancers made it worth it. “The first challenge was just from the knees down, and then by challenge ten, you had dancers who maybe weren’t so confident on week one, and by the end they were putting up full body videos of themselves and really going for it.” Lauren’s relentless positivity had a massively noticeable presence on social media throughout the initial lockdown, offering extensive praise and to dancers who took the daunting decision to step outside their comfort zones.
It wasn’t long before Lauren started putting more twists on her videos, showcasing dances with more freestyle and street influence, injecting personality into a dance form that is famously rigid. But Lauren’s dance training is somewhat unconventional compared to the rest of her professional colleagues. She comes from a Festival background, a style that is traditionally associated with Northern Ireland, and focuses more on slow, individualistic and emotion-driven performances rather than the explosiveness and athleticism that characterises most other Irish dance organisations. Having a colourful competitive background in Festival, winning the Northern Ireland Championships nine times, and the Ulster’s four times, she was particularly qualified to bring something different to the table. “What’s so special about it, is we’re encouraged to kind of try and dance with the music to express our emotions,” she says.
However, Lauren didn’t always feel so confident about expressing her Festival personality. When she joined Riverdance in 2009, having been unsuccessful the first time round, she would work her way to the lead role within two years. She was naturally drawn to trying to emulate the past leads and didn’t channel as much of her own unique dancing qualities. “For years, as much as I was proud of my background, I didn’t really have the confidence to show it off,” she explains. “It wasn’t until one day on a long tour, I just happened to do a move and it caught someone’s eye and one of the girls said, ‘What’s that?’ I said ‘Well, that’s my festival slip jig’, and they’re like, ‘Are you crazy? Why have you never shown us that?’” The rest is history. Lauren’s elegant and unique light dancing style offers an unmistakable Festival quality that no other Riverdance lead ever has in the history of the show.
Far from the days where Lauren would shy away from her true style, she recently graduated from hard shoe routines to all out shuffling. “One day, I was actually really stuck for dance inspiration. So I’ve always admired shuffling…I’m looking at these dancers thinking, ‘If I’m an Irish dancer, and I can’t do this, there’s something wrong. I need to be as good as these people.’” She explains that while her close friends know she’s not one to shy away from the dance floor on a night out, it was still a daunting prospect to take her videos in a different direction. “Maybe people who don’t know me so well, at the start were like, ‘What is she doing?’’’ she laughs. “It’s important to put yourself out there. You leave yourself open for criticism with every video that you put out, but as long as you’re kind of staying true to yourself, and who you are, then that’s all you can do.”
Before we bring the interview to a close, we take a step back to look at Lauren’s career from afar, pondering the one question she’s probably been asked more than anything else in her career. Just what is it like to be a lead in Riverdance, and live the life every Irish dancer dreams of from childhood? “Since I was seven or eight years old, to get into Riverdance, and to be a lead was always the dream, it was always the vision for me,” she explains thoughtfully. “So to have achieved that, I’ll be forever grateful, and forever grateful for the people that helped me along the way.” “It was even more fulfilling as well,” she adds, “when I didn’t have the confidence to show and express my Festival style, when I started to infuse that into my lead routines, it was just lovely to be dancing on the stage and represent who I truly was, as a person and as a dancer.”
Lauren’s identity as a dancer is just as strong now during her stage hiatus as it was at the height of her last tour. Her latest mark on the dance world was her “I Am Still A Dancer” video, projecting a universal message for the Irish dance community that while the lights are off and the curtains are drawn, we’re still dancers, “whether we’re dancing in a theatre or in our backyard in the freezing cold”.
Follow Lauren Smyth on Instagram.
