Irish dance teacher wins global excellence award

Even her name is Irish — and a little bit bubbly, ready to celebrate her recent worldwide win.

Trea Champagne of Iowa City, who owns and operates Champagne Academy of Irish Dance in North Liberty, is one of 20 Irish dance teachers globally to receive the 2022 Excellence in Teaching Award from Irish Dancing Magazine. And she’s the only certified Irish dance teacher in Iowa.

“Trea Champagne is known to be an engaging, caring and inspirational dance teacher,” Denise Keane, the magazine’s publisher, said in a statement announcing the award.

Champagne, 49, been jigging and reeling as long as she can remember. With a grandmother who was 100-percent Irish and a last name rooted in the formerly Celtic region of northern France, the Minneapolis native has been immersed in her cultural heritage all her life.

“St. Paul has a large Irish dancing community,” she said, “so we just kind of grew up with it.”

At a glance

What: Champagne Academy of Irish Dance

Where: 365 Beaver Kreek Centre, North Liberty; satellite space in Bishop Hill, Ill.

Details: champagneirishdance.com/ or facebook.com/ChampagneIrishDance

She began lessons during grade school and started competing when she was a bit older — and her feet haven’t stopped. Even during college, she kept studying Irish dance on the side.

“My grandmother danced until she was 79 so my minimum goal is to at least get to 79,” Champagne said. “And do things change? Well, yeah. Your body matures and things change. It doesn’t mean that you can’t teach, it just means that you have to be smarter about what you do — make better decisions.”

Teaching

One of those better decisions was to pursue Irish dance teaching certification. She likened the dance exam to “a Ph.D. program. It’s not a common thing,” she said. “There’s only a few thousand of us in the world. …

“You study your whole life. To pass a test, it's typically people who have been active for their entire life, so you usually have to be at least in your 20s to be eligible to take the exam. And most people have been dancing for probably 20-some years before they even decide to try to take the exam to be a certified Irish dance teacher.”

She waited even longer.

After teaching biology, chemistry and math in Minnesota, she moved to Iowa City in 2007 for graduate studies in paleontology. She didn’t find an Irish community there, but as word spread about her artistry, she kept getting referrals for dance students who needed extra practice or instruction, so she began teaching.

Between graduate school and having two children, she didn’t take and pass the exam until 2016. She said the certification is an endorsement that not only “shows that you know what you’re doing,” it also allows her students to compete on the regional, national and world championship levels.

Champagne is especially proud that in 2022, Emily Phelan of Iowa City became her first student — and the first in Iowa to qualify for the Irish Dance World Championships.

Her students typically have to drive about five hours to get to competitions in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago or St. Louis, and some even drive two hours to study with Champagne in North Liberty. She also has a satellite space in Bishop Hill, Ill., to accommodate students in Western Illinois, including the Quad Cities and Geneseo.

She offers instruction for ages 3 through adult, and her daughter, 11, and son, 7, have become competitive Irish dancers. While she said her studio is “extremely small,” with 35 and 40 students, she and her studio are the only certified Irish dance school and teacher in Iowa. She also offers instruction in singing and acting, further immersing her students in Irish traditions and folk art.

Life lessons

Champagne said Irish dance is an international sport that teaches students so much more than just soft-shoe and hard-shoe steps, with hands at their sides or clapping, with feet and hair flying.

“Like a lot of hobbies or sports, (it) teaches a lot of really good life lessons. One thing that I really love about Irish dance is that it's very musical — extremely musical — because you're literally making music with your feet,” she said.

“It's a great-great-great grandfather of tap — it’s very old and it's very rhythmic, so you learn a lot of musical skills. Irish dancing is really one and the same, it's just that we play our music with our feet instead of our hands and our mouth or whatnot. … It teaches perseverance, and it’s very athletic. There's just so many great life lessons that you learn along the way.”

That’s especially important nowadays, she noted, when she hears parents complain about their kids wanting instant gratification and “not sticking with something.”

Champagne offers introductory lessons where students can try Irish dance in five-week mini sessions before committing to the full eight- or 10-week sessions that typically follow the school calendars and continue into summer.

And of course, with St. Patrick’s Day right around the corner, her dancers are in the midst of their busy season with performances and parades in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, but they’re in demand throughout the year, as well. They recently performed during the Irish Winterfest at CSPS Hall in Cedar Rapids on Jan. 29, and performed an Irish Christmas show Dec. 17 at The James Theater in Iowa City.

Traditional trappings

Irish dance is not an inexpensive endeavor. Like other types of dance classes, the students need specific shoes, costumes and the curly wigs girls typically wear in competitions. Champagne stocks shoes and clothing at her school, and can assist with fitting the shoes and finding clothing to buy or rent.

The dresses can range from “a couple hundred” to $4,000, she said. Ornate dresses can cost upward of $2,500 to buy, and solo dresses can run $4,000 or more, depending on the ornamentation, but renting dresses in both categories helps keep down costs. The curly wigs vary in quality, styles, colors and prices online, and can run upward of $100.

In soft-shoe dancing, beginners can wear ballet slippers or just socks. Once they advance, the girls can switch to ghillies that lace across the foot, with boys wearing something akin to a jazz shoe with a heel. Prices online range from $30 to $100.

Soft-shoe style is bouncy, Champagne said, with the dancers pushing off the floor to get the lift that looks so light and airy. Once students master enough of the steps and kicks, they can explore the percussive hard-shoe style, which can run about $70 to $150 online.

“Every sound you hear is a distinct movement or a hit with the floor or another part of your foot,” Champagne explained. “There's still accentuation and hopping, it's just that we make sound.”

Riverdance and Lord of the Dance have given Irish dance a huge boost in visibility and popularity since the 1990s, but Champagne noted that those shows are “professional productions rooted in Irish dance,” involving a story line.

“The story is really about, basically, a huge population coming to America and a blending of cultures,” she said, “so it's bringing that Irish tradition that they missed so much from their homeland, and starting anew.

“Riverdance is a great show — it’s very popular and very successful,” she said, adding that like everything, interest “wanes and waxes” with time. But not her interest or her mission to preserve pieces of the past into the present and future.

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com