In 2017, Erica Schiff travelled alone to the All Scotland Championships. Without family, teachers, or classmates by her side she took to the stage and gave all three rounds everything she had. Later that day, she was announced as the winner. “I was shaking, I was crying. I was just smiling so big, my cheeks hurt for like two days afterwards,” she says. With no one there to celebrate her success, a teacher from her home region of Southern America encouraged her back onto the podium to take pictures of her first ever international major competition win. “I got kicked out of the room because we were the last awards,” she says. “The ushers literally picked up my suitcases and were holding things and ushered me out the door holding the trophy going ‘what just happened to me?’” she laughs.
Still on cloud nine after her win, Erica, who dances for the Watters School, rushed home to Orlando, Florida the next day (Monday) to sit a chemistry test Tuesday. On Wednesday, she departed once again for the UK to compete at the Great Britain Championships, landing Thursday, to dance Friday. Despite being convinced that she didn’t perform as well as she did the previous weekend, she was once again announced as the winner. “I’m sitting there and I’m like, ‘I just won two international majors in a week and a half, and I haven’t slept in like 30 hours, and what is just happening?’”
“I was just smiling so big, my cheeks hurt for like two days afterwards.”
Erica Schiff
Erica’s consecutive successes is the stuff of dreams. While she noticed her results were climbing that year, it would be easy to assume from the outside that this was an overnight success. “I’d say that if you look at my results, you would think that it was really, really smooth,” she says. “You’d think that it was this amazing journey.” However behind the titles was an immense amount of hard work. What makes her story even more unconventional is that she returned to Irish dancing at the age of 23, having danced from ages 8-18, but health problems prevented her from training seriously.
Three months after she returned to her first class, she won prelim at a double feis both days. This would be the first in a string of goals that Erica set for herself that grew bigger and more ambitious. “I didn’t really realise how much I could accomplish until I was doing it.” she says. At her first Oireachtas back, she got eighth place and a qualifying spot for her first World Championships – the 2014 Worlds in London. She was delighted to achieve two grid points that day, placing 97th overall. The following year in Montreal, taking everyone by surprise, including herself, she recalled. She was so convinced that a recall was out of sight, that she didn’t even have an open set dance prepared. “So I walked out on stage. And my whole school was there because we were doing dance drama there, and I did our prelim set at Worlds. And it brought me up two places to 33rd!” she says, ecstatic at the memory. “That was kind of the first time where I went, ‘I can really go somewhere with this, this is nowhere near my best,’” she says.
“I didn’t really realise how much I could accomplish until I was doing it.”
Erica Schiff
From that point, Erica trained relentlessly to make up for lost years. “I really, really struggled in terms of kind of catching up to my own placement level,” she explains. “My skills in some places were really lopsided…I would do a two hour private with my teacher about one bar of a step.” She adds: “I couldn’t just be told, ‘Okay, fix it this way’, I had to go through ‘You have to lift this here, and then pull that up there.’”
Erica also benefited from the fact that her body had not been through the constant training in her teen years that often makes dancers in their twenties suffer from repetitive strain injuries and general wear and tear. “I’ve been so lucky. For my age, I hadn’t dealt with injuries,” she explains. “If you’re competing at top five in the world level, top 10 in the world level, for 20 years, your body’s gonna fall apart completely.” However when she was 28, she started to experience aches and pains. “It started to catch up with me just a little bit. And Irish dance doesn’t have seasons, you don’t get a break,” she says.
However the year she suffered with Achilles tendonitis would also prove to be the highlight of her dancing career. Erica describes the 2019 World Championships in Greensboro, North Carolina, as one of her best moments, but also one of her hardest. “I just wanted to be able to get up on stage and do my absolute best. And I stressed so much about disappointing myself,” she explains. “My personal mindset was that if I was going to come back, as an adult, I was going to pay for this myself, I was working for all of this…I didn’t want to have any regrets.” Erica pulled through that day and walked away with third place and a globe. “I was beyond the moon happy…it was like this release in some ways,” she says. “It was just the best moment to raise that globe on that podium.”
It’s not surprising that pressure threatened to get the better of her that day after the regimented schedule her training consisted of. Every morning she would pile up her car with everything to get her through the day, going from class, to work, to dance, in different orders. She didn’t have the luxury of free evenings to practice for two hours, so instead she would take 10, 15, or 30 minutes at work and break down one move until she had it right. “I had to be really strategic about what I worked on and how I worked on it, and honestly really ruthless,” she says. “You can’t have any illusions about what you need to work on.”
The Covid-19 pandemic prevented Erica from going for one last Worlds, which prompted the decision to finally end her competitive career. “Retiring I think is always a sensitive topic for Irish dancers in general,” she says. “I’d actually had a couple of years of conversations about retiring every year up to Worlds where it was like ‘I got eighth. Well, do you think that that’s it? Well, no, I think I still have a lot that I can improve in my dancing. And so I don’t think I’m done’. I got fourth, ‘You hit the podium. That’s amazing. Are you happy now?’ And I go ‘Well, my placement was amazing. But I still think that I could fix this.’”
“You can’t have any illusions about what you need to work on.”
Erica Schiff
But the downtime gave Erica an opportunity to reflect, allowing her to realize that she was content with the level she reached. “I could sit back and appreciate what I had accomplished instead of focusing on what I still had to do,” she explains. She also saw huge achievements outside of her competitive career too. She had an undergraduate degree in theatre and anthropology, worked as a dancer at Harry Potter World, toured with Lord of the Dance in Taiwan 2018, and squeezed in science classes on the side. These classes allowed her to make a career change as she returns to college later this year to study veterinary medicine.
The prospect of retirement is inevitably tinged with sadness for Erica, now 30, who feels as though it’s the end of an era. “I have been so extremely lucky,” she says. “I’ve just been dancing all day and dancing all night, and dancing around the world and dancing and dancing. And that’s more than I ever wished for, ever dreamed of. That’s all I ever wanted out of my life.”
“I don’t know that I’ll ever love anything as much as I do dance. But I also am kind of ready to find something else that I am as passionate about in a different way.”
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