Owen Luebbers: “Irish Dancing Is Bigger Than Irish Dancing — It’s Life, You Know?”

Owen Luebbers has the kind of resume most Irish dancers can only dream of. At 26, the Dublin-based, Pennsylvania-born dancer has podium-placed at his last 10 CLRG World Championships, winning twice. He’s a multi-time All Ireland, All Scotland, Great Britain, North American, and British and Irish National champion. He has won the Mid-Atlantic Oireachtas over a dozen times, and, more recently, the Leinster Qualifiers. 

As a trailblazer for online dancers-turned-creators, he first went viral on the now-defunct Vine in 2014, and today has nearly 250,000 TikTok followers. His show experience, meanwhile, includes both Riverdance and Lord Of The Dance.

He has also distinguished himself offstage as an outspoken figure in the dance world, appearing in the 2023 documentary The Year That Rocked Irish Dancing, the three-part BBC One programme which explored the CLRG cheating scandal. This April, he released a deeply personal EP,  ‘WHITEOUT’, detailing his complex experiences as a competitive dancer. 

But if Owen is defined by his achievements, it’s not by the trophies or view counts. Indeed, he speaks about his successes and setbacks with parallel conviction that the significance of these moments lies, above all, in how they illuminate the path on either side. Victory will never bring fulfilment if your sense of self is lost in its pursuit; a loss that invites clarity is just as likely an opportunity. Balanced with appreciation for where his hard work has brought him, Owen is candid about the thread of complexity that defines each notable dance experience, be it the surprising letdown of a dream achieved, or the unexpected freedom of one ripped away. 

Owen started dancing at five in his home state of Pennsylvania, following in the footsteps of his two older siblings, Ian and Cassidy. “I kind of just fell in love with it from a really young age,” Owen remembers, noting that even early on, he had big ambitions. “My personality is very like…I’ll see something through to the end,” he says. “I think initially, I thought maybe that that meant winning the Worlds. And then when I won the Worlds…I kind of had to take a step back and reevaluate.”

This first win in 2017, he says, brought on a complex mix of emotions about his dance journey, compounded by a concussion that temporarily removed him from both dance and college shortly after his win. “It was a pretty isolating experience,” he remembers, but he says it allowed him to reevaluate his goals and his school environment. “It kind of forced me to take that step back…and be like, ‘OK, is this the best place for me? Is this going to help me grow as a person and as a dancer?’ And I ultimately came to the conclusion that it wasn’t.”

Owen says his family had considered moving schools when he was younger, but ultimately felt they couldn’t — a sentiment he notes is common, if rarely voiced. “It felt like the end of the world,” he remembers. “I felt like I was going to die…This is where all my friends are. This is my social environment. This is my life.” He says the decision to transfer was complicated by the friends he had at the school, as well as his long tenure there. “Transferring when you’re 19 after winning the Worlds isn’t something that a lot of people do,” he observes. “Once you get to that point in your career, most people are just…for lack of a better word, they’re stuck.”

Ultimately, though, Owen says he didn’t feel valued as a dancer in his current environment. Additionally, he says winning Worlds taught him that becoming the best dancer he could be mattered more to him than any result, which didn’t align with the teaching style. “I had the same reel steps for like, four years,” he remembers, “because they had this mindset that, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ But that’s never going to make you grow as a dancer.”

Owen ultimately transferred to Dublin’s Holly and Kavanagh Academy, where his brother, the late Ian Luebbers — a world champion and legendary dancer in his own right — had recently moved himself. While he doesn’t minimise the challenges of learning a new style 15 years into his career, he says it was clear he’d found the change he needed. “They had a totally different approach,” he says, and while he ultimately won the Worlds again in 2023, when he talks about success with his new school, it is all in terms of his growth as a dancer and as a choreographer.

“Once I was comfortable with the style… [it] just evolved to feel even more like me,” he says, adding that while his distinctively powerful and intricate moves, such as his signature overs with a sharp kick through, have evolved unconsciously, “the influence has come from everywhere.” Given Holly and Kavanagh’s reputation for innovative choreography, it is unsurprising that the most important influence he cites is collaboration with his teacher, Niall Holly — with whom he continued to dance at the Niall Holly Academy — who he says pushes him while giving him space to trust his instincts, building a final product that is “100 per cent me and 100 per cent Niall”. 

Owen says he began to reevaluate his relationship with competition last year, looking toward the upcoming NAIDC. “I felt this urgency to move on,” he remembers, ultimately concluding that the 2025 Worlds would be his last. Then, during St Patrick’s Day week, he broke his foot.

“It wasn’t even dramatic…it was just doing my reel one night,” he remembers of the injury that derailed not only his plans for Worlds, but his performance schedule during the busiest week of the year. But just as he views the nuance in success, he says this apparent setback wasn’t the tragedy an outside observer might assume. “Even though it was awful, it felt weirdly right,” he says. “It didn’t feel like something was being taken from me. It felt like I was being given something.”

“I think sometimes I’ll ignore signals that my body is sending me,” he adds, saying the injury helped him re-examine why he was competing in the first place. “It gave me the sense that maybe I was just doing it for other people,” he says. “Maybe I was just continuing to compete so that other people would get their happy ending, their sense of closure for my career.”

One factor in winding down his competitive career, Owen says, was that the intensity of competition had kept him from pursuing other goals, like shows and music. With that in mind, he saw recovery as a chance to pivot. “It felt like I was being given time and mental space to do something with,” he says. “I was forced to sit still, but I wasn’t doing nothing.”

Even before the injury, Owen had planned to release an EP of four songs the day after his final competition. While he wrote them independently, he realised in retrospect that they were connected by a deeply personal exploration of his dance experience — one he felt many dancers might relate to. 

“I think a lot of people in the Irish dance world don’t actually talk about the literal experiences that they have,” he observes. “I think it’s to the detriment of the Irish dance world at large.”

He continues: “There’s this culture of pretending that things aren’t happening, looking the other way, just turning a blind eye to everything and this was something that I was like, ‘Well, nobody can argue with how I felt about a situation — nobody can say that I was wrong.’”

While the songs are based on his experiences, he notes that their themes apply broadly. “Am I still a champion, even if I haven’t won?” he muses in the EP’s reflective second track, ‘Halophyte’. “There’s some themes of isolation —  feeling like you’re alone in a certain experience…There’s also feelings of chasing this high of success…and then kind of feeling let down by it.”

Owen adds that it’s critical for dancers to understand that their success in Irish dance is unconnected to their worth as people — a theme the EP explores in depth. “This experience that I had at my old dance school…even when I won the Worlds, that still wasn’t enough…like, I wasn’t good enough as a person,” he remembers.

“So much of Irish dancing is tied up in how you view yourself,” he says. “Sometimes when somebody gives you a correction…you kind of take it to mean that not only is your foot not turned out, but you’re a horrible person.”

“That’s obviously not how teachers mean it,” he’s quick to add, “but sometimes that’s how it feels.”

The process of releasing the EP, he explains, has been like “a sociological experiment”. He compares it to the release of The Year That Rocked Irish Dancing. “You had people coming up to me and coming up to my teacher and my mom…in whispers, being like, ‘We loved you in the documentary, we love what you did’, but they were afraid to actually say it,” he remembers. He says engagement with the EP has been similar, noting that view counts and shares on promotional posts have been massively disproportionate to public comments. 

“It speaks to that culture of silence…people are a little bit jarred when somebody does say something, because they’re like, ‘Why? Why are you doing that? You’re not supposed to do that,’” he says. “And I’m like…I’m not even saying anything. I’m just saying something.”

With this in mind, Owen says he carefully considered the timing of the release. “I don’t think there’s anything that I couldn’t have said while dancing in the EP, but, just to be safe, I was like, ‘Let me wait,’” he says, noting that the intensity of competition was significant enough without added worry or distraction. Despite the challenge of injury, it afforded Owen the freedom to focus on the release. “I started to really, really enjoy this creative process — just creating things for the sake of creating,” he says, drawing parallels between promoting the EP and his experience as a choreographer.

In addition to focusing on music, Owen has maintained his involvement in dance through teaching and choreography, and plans to build his professional dance career. While he’s “pretty confident” in his decision to retire from competition, this decision, too, has meant making peace with the challenges of big change. “Life doesn’t give you perfect happy closed endings with a bow on top,” he says, reflecting on the ambivalence he felt attending the Worlds in Dublin without competing. “You’re never going to be satisfied or happy with how things end.”

“I think Irish dancing is bigger than Irish dancing — it’s life, you know?” he adds. “Everything that you go through and experience within this insular world is just a microcosm of the bigger world.”

While Owen is done competing, he says he’s not done reflecting on his career, or talking about his experiences. He’s also in no rush to say everything at once. “I feel like it’ll be done in trickles for a long time,” he muses. “Part of what I’m trying to figure out now that I’m done competing is, ‘How best can I communicate the things that I have to say?’” 

At the same time, he hopes actively competing dancers think critically about whether their needs are being met. He notes that a teacher’s style doesn’t have to be straightforwardly harmful to be incompatible with a student’s needs — and that, by extension, a dancer’s decision to find a better fit does not have to be a condemnation of the school. “Think about it like a school teacher,” he advises. “I had different school teachers growing up that I was more receptive to…not every teaching style is going to work for every person.”

“There’s this sense of tribal allegiance to a certain dance school,” he observes. “But at the end of the day, if it’s not working…you’re allowed to leave.”

More than anything, he says his experiences have taught him that true success in dance starts with a sense of self outside the studio. “Irish dancing doesn’t have to be your whole life,” he says, adding, “it doesn’t last forever.”

“You have to think about who you are without it. You have to think about what you’re passionate about, who you are as a person, not as an Irish dancer. Obviously, it’s going to be a part of your identity, but it doesn’t have to be your whole identity.”

As with everything, finding those passions outside of dance invites its own challenges — in Owen’s case, that he wants to take on everything at once. But as he moves past competition, he’s ready to navigate those nuances, building on what he’s learned in the studio. “I just feel like I want to do it all right now…let me just do everything right now. And I’m like, ‘No, I think there’s time.’”

Follow Owen Luebbers on Instagram.

Photography: Courtesy of Owen Luebbers
Design: Colleen Falco
Words: Gabrielle Siegel
Editor-In-Chief: Hollie Geraghty
Social Media and Editorial Assistant: Caitlin Clarke