Laura Davidson joins our Zoom call just four days after taking the TCRG certification exam in Dublin, preparation for which she dove straight into on the heels of achieving sixth place at her final World Championships in Glasgow. The road, she insists, has not been linear. “If I could go back in time and tell myself about the journey ahead, I wouldn’t say anything about the results of competitions over the years. I’d say that in the studio I found a whole new family, and I also found myself.”
You don’t have to know Laura personally to get a sense of just how hard she works. Over the past few years, she’s been transparent about her grind to get better in every possible way, sharing her progress and documenting hours in the studio on social media. Her humble Instagram bio puts it simply: “I dance. A LOT.”
Laura’s dancing style has only gotten stronger and more explosive in this time. From the sheer physicality of her choreography to her incredibly detailed technique, she brings a unique combination of power and elegance with her limber ankles, gravity-defying jumps, and stage-wide sprints en pointe.
But it was the the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought the entire competitive Irish dance world to a screeching halt, that really marked a shift. Laura kept up dancing on her own like many of us, but something was missing. “I wasn’t dancing as well. And I wasn’t putting everything into it.”
Then, one day before competitions had fully resumed, it all just clicked. “I was really listening to my teacher, Sharon, and it all started to come together,” she says.
This transformation has been 20 years in the making. Growing up in a family of Irish dancers and musicians, Laura describes herself as being quite literally born into dancing. “I don’t think there was a specific starting age. It was always there,” she says. Her sisters grew up competing in An Chomhdháil, but her oldest sister encouraged their mother to put Laura through CLRG to experience bigger competitions. She has spent her entire career training with the Sharon Taylor Irish Dance Academy based in Bellshill, Scotland, just outside of Laura’s hometown in North Lanarkshire.
“I was really listening to my teacher, and it all started to come together”
“I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t taken along to competitions to dance, but we probably started doing them very regularly when I was around eight years old,” Laura says. “Rather than just the odd feis here and there, my weekends started to revolve around feiseanna.”
Her first time recalling at the Worlds came when she reached the Ladies U19 age group at the 2016 World Championships in Glasgow, where she placed 46th. However, her first major jump in the rankings came the following year at the 2017 Worlds in Dublin, climbing to 28th place in her competition. She attributes this quick ascent to the fact that she was simply working harder — something which would very much became a theme throughout the course of her dancing career.
Laura would go on to secure her first World medal at thirteenth place in 2018 in Glasgow. She finished in the same place the following year in Greensboro in the 21-23 Ladies combined age group, but unfortunately was just one spot shy of a medal.
In the window between the Covid lockdowns and the return to class and competitions, Laura was listening to her teacher’s feedback more intently than ever, and everything finally started to fall into place. Then, starting in January 2022, she spent every weekend competing everywhere she could.
“I was really getting used to being on the stage and starting to dance on the stage like how I would dance in class,” a feat which any dancer knows is not easy. “You see some people that dance much better on the stage than they dance in class. I was the opposite for a very long time.”
This constant exposure to the stage paid dividends when Laura skyrocketed all the way to fourth place at the 2022 World Championships in Belfast, her first time on the podium. “I was just hoping to get my World medal back,” Laura confesses. “If I’m being dead honest, I was really hoping for top 10, but I wouldn’t have even told anybody that because it was one of those wee secret dreams you have to yourself.”
Riding the high of this massive success with a newfound fire in her feet, Laura wasn’t ready to break the momentum any time soon. At the start of the 2023 competition season, she set out on a new conditioning regimen of cross-training as well as a nutritional wellness plan.
“If I was 100 per cent the strongest and the fittest that I could be, [and] everything that I could control was 100 per cent, then the rest would fall into place”
“You can’t control what happens on stage. You can’t control how other people will dance; you can’t control if the judges will like you or not. But if I was 100 per cent the strongest and the fittest that I could be, [and] everything that I could control was 100 per cent, then the rest would fall into place.”
Another significant component of Laura’s new training system was stage time, as she increased her competitive commitments to twice a week for the entire year. “You don’t need to be born a natural dancer,” she maintains. “Yes, it’s helpful to have, but I certainly wasn’t. I had to get there through hard work.”
Those smaller feiseanna, she found, not only made a difference in helping her stay on the podium, but also created some of her favorite memories of Irish dance. In 2023, Laura reached two personal milestones when she won the Champion of Champions competitions both at the West of Scotland Championships and Feis Ní Gríanna in Newton Mearns.
Leading up to the 2023 World Championships in Montreal, Laura bagged first place titles at the Scottish Nationals, her first time winning a major, as well as the British Nationals. Once she made it to Montreal in April of that year, she landed on the podium once more in fourth place.
Although she had already made the personal decision that the 2024 World Championships would be her last, Laura did not slow down her competitive streak in the slightest. At the beginning of this past March, Laura and two of her closest dancing pals, Declan McLaughlin and world champion Oscar Donnelly, embarked on the ultimate Irish dancer road trip for a double feis weekend, all three competing at the Scanlon Feis in Birmingham on one day followed by the City of London Feis in London the next.
Her double win at these competitions propelled her into April when these past World Championships were hosted once again in Glasgow, the perfect destination for the proud 27-year-old Scot to give her final performance.
When it came to a bittersweet day two — a day that Laura says truly felt like it was her last — her time on the stage was nothing if not memorable. Four out of the top six in her competition all ended up dancing one after another in the set round: Annalise Carter (AMDC), Julia O’Rourke (Doherty Petri), Dara McAleer (The Academy), and then herself; talk about your star-studded roster. In fact, Laura, Julia, and Dara had also shared the stage during their first round on that day. “You couldn’t even make this up,” she laughs.
Those final two minutes on the stage were a culmination of Laura’s immense personal strength, reflected in her demeanor and dancing style. “We were absolutely delighted with how I danced my set. I think it’s probably the best I’ve ever danced.” Reflecting later on Instagram, she posted a FeisTV clip of her “final bow,” writing, “6th place at my final ever World Championships and a high like I’ve never felt before…I am absolutely buzzing with all of my performances today and I left that stage knowing that I had nothing more left to give.”
Laura is no stranger to sharing her feelings and dancing journey on social media. Though she admits to being late to downloading TikTok in 2020, she quickly fell in love with all the Irish dance content flooding the app, even the most random videos of dancers on stage or in the studio. So, she started doing the same.
“I was just posting any old daft video of me talking. And then, quite quickly, I had seen I was getting a lot of comments if I had a wig and stuff on, like people might be interested in seeing the process of this.”
“I’ve never really shied away from showing myself on social media”
Laura’s TikTok page now has a dedicated playlist of her signature “Get Ready With Me” videos that document the unedited Irish dance glam process, from layers of glamorous make-up, to towering donuts, false lashes, and showers of hairspray. She invites us into the “dressing room” with these video diary-style confessionals, sharing her opinions, hopes, fears, and whatever else crosses her mind in her. She also loves having a good laugh, even in spite of herself.
“I’ve never really shied away from showing myself on social media,” Laura says, and it’s precisely this authenticity that attracts people to her page. She shares that several of her behind-the-scenes videos have racked up five to six million views in addition to hundreds of thousands of comments that range from “YOUR VOICE AND MANNERISMS ARE SO ENDEARING!!!” to “Dolly Parton would live for this look.”
Ranked as a top five Scottish influencer on TikTok on Spey’s 2023 Influencer Report, Laura says that she’s interested in more than just creating entertaining content. Her goal is to engage new audiences who might have been exposed to Riverdance but do not know much about the competitive side of Irish dancing.
“I was also posting videos of me just dancing in the studio. No wig, no makeup, nothing. And they can see the hard work that goes behind it as well. It’s not just a beauty pageant; it’s actually a sport. So I’ve been quite keen to show all different sides of it.”
Laura also wants to use the community she has cultivated on TikTok to post educational videos about nutrition and cross-training for Irish dancers, joining the ranks of popular accounts such as Are You Feis Fit and Target Training. In fact, she is currently preparing to get her personal trainer qualification with specialties in nutrition and weight management.
For most young dancers growing up in the social media age, TikTok and Instagram are part of their daily lives, so why not use it to meet them where they are? “At the end of the day,” Laura says, “it is passing on an education to kids, and you want to be providing the best education possible.”
She has already launched herself headfirst into this next phase of her Irish dance journey. Just one week after the World Championships concluded in Glasgow, Laura, along with two of her close friends, went on a holiday in Spain to prepare for the TCRG exam.
”It felt daft not to just take the opportunity and try the TCRG exam regardless of the outcome of it”
The CLRG had just done away with the waiting list procedures for prospective applicants, and Laura’s dance teacher immediately forwarded her the exam information for Dublin the first weekend of June. “At that point I didn’t even have the ceili book, and the exam was nine weeks away,” she recalls breathlessly.
Nevertheless, they buckled down and committed to seven weeks of studying full-time. Otherwise, she would not have had the chance to attempt the exam until 2025, and since she had just completed her final competition, she didn’t want to spare a single moment. She feels confident in preparing the best she could, and is now in the long wait for results. “It felt daft not to just take the opportunity and try regardless of the outcome of it,” Laura says. “I’ll have no regrets because I tried that.”
Being an Irish dance teacher has been part of Laura’s long-term career plan since she was just 14 or 15 years old. She had always been good at math and sciences in school growing up, but when it came time to meet with the career advisor she proclaimed, “I want to be a dancing teacher.” She did not know how to respond to the advisor’s inquiries about her plan B, to be an engineer or astronaut, perhaps. “I had no idea of anything else I wanted to do, because I really didn’t want to do anything else.”
Looking back across the span of her dancing career, she says that underneath the drive and determination is giving in to the process and believing that what is for you will not pass you, sentiments that echo throughout her social media platforms. She explains: “In dance you can’t always control the destination, so you need to learn to love the journey. It’s not always about the results. They’re great to have, but I would say if you enjoy the journey, if you learn to love all the little parts of dancing, you’ll keep going.”
Laura credits her dance teacher for being an advocate for encouraging these positive mentalities and emboldening her to pass on those messages and life teachings, as well as her hard-working mother and sisters for nurturing such a supportive household. “They inspire me to want to inspire other people, to want the best for other people, to help each other out, to be kind.”
That is her true calling. You can hear the passion in her voice and see it reflected in her bright blue eyes. It is clear that it is not only her dancing skills and fitness knowledge, but her compassion and empathy that poise Laura to be a great leader and role model for the next generation of Irish dancers.
Photography: Declan McLaughlin
Design: Colleen Falco
Words: Siobhan Cooney
Editor-In-Chief: Hollie Geraghty
