The sound of Irish hornpipes cascades through the room, ricocheting off the cavernous Cohen Auditorium walls, as two dancers on stage prepare themselves. Freshmen Claire O'Brien and Alexa Petersen stare intently ahead at the horizon, their upper bodies forming two rigid lines: shoulders straight back, chests proudly jutting out, arms stuck to the side of the torso, fists clenched into little balls.
The two freshmen wait a few beats, counting off the rhythm. A layer of black tape has been applied to the hard plastic tips of their dancing shoes for added grip. Even after weeks of practicing their Irish dance routines here, the wooden Cohen floor is still relatively unpredictable.
On the surface, today's practice is just another mundane exercise for Petersen and O'Brien. Petersen has been training in the art of Irish dancing since she was seven years old and O'Brien since the age of four. But with the World Irish Dancing Championships less than a month away, every moment of practice becomes crucial.
That's where the black tape comes into play. Petersen and O'Brien cannot afford to slip and twist an ankle or sprain a wrist — not when they have only two or three years left to compete internationally before their knees and ankles can no longer handle the massive strain.
Petersen and O'Brien will leave in late March for the 2010 World Championships in Glasgow, Scotland. It will be Petersen's seventh time competing and O'Brien's fourth. For the past few years, the duo has dominated at the regional and national level, and by sheer coincidence, both young women enrolled at Tufts this fall.
The two freshmen lean on each other for support as they deal with practicing in a foreign environment and living dual lives as Tufts students and world−class Irish dancers.
"It's really nice to have some time to talk to about your frustrations," Petersen said. "You're kind of used to being a fine−tuned machine, and you get to college and you're trying so hard to get that perfection that you used to have … and sometimes you don't have a mirror, sometimes you don't have a good stage or enough time to practice. It's good to share that with somebody."
O'Brien and Petersen have settled into a routine of practicing in Cohen and sometimes on the Sophia Gordon Multipurpose Room dance floor. These places are not as precisely designed for Irish dancing as the studios at the O'Shea−Chaplin Academy of Irish Dance in Allston, Mass., where Claire grew up, or at the Pender Keady Academy of Irish Dance in Stamford, Conn., where Petersen learned her moves, but the two 18−year−olds make do.
"Alexa is a sort of mirror for me, and I'm [hers]" O'Brien said. "At this point, she can anticipate what I am going to do, since we're practicing so much together."
Today's practice begins with a few warm−up drills that O'Brien learned at O'Shea−Chaplin. Then O'Brien and Petersen each run through the routines that they will be performing at the World Championships, where the competition is broken up into two components: the rhythmic hard−shoe section — in which swift, precise steps are paramount — and the more graceful soft−shoe section, in which style and technical perfection are the keys to success.
As O'Brien practices her routine, Petersen barks out advice. When Petersen starts her routine, O'Brien does the same. There are no teachers here, just two young women pushing themselves to improve.
"We really are going back and forth all the time, always correcting each other so that we get better," Petersen said. "We both have a trained eye for what the judges are looking for."
The two dancers have contrasting styles, a product of their different kinds of training and coaching.
"The styles come from our teachers," O'Brien said. "I see Alexa doing things that every teacher wants from a dancer, and then she does something that's the one thing my teacher looks [to correct]. And then I do things that Alexa sees and says, ‘If you walked into my studio and did that, my teacher would kill you!' Which is funny, because all the teachers are judges as well."
Both women only have a few years left of competitive dancing. They have yet to see a dancer older than 22 compete at Worlds, due to the physical toll dancing takes on one's body.
"I've sacrificed much in my life: time, sometimes even academics," said Petersen, who has already had knee surgery and has been in physical therapy since she was eight.
While O'Brien and Petersen have already garnered many honors, including top−five regional finishes and top−10 national finishes, they still have goals to fulfill. At Worlds, the judges will see over a hundred dancers, but only one−third will be called back — a great honor, especially for an American in a competition traditionally dominated by Europeans. Petersen was called back last year and hopes to repeat her success in 2010. O'Brien, after three years of coming up empty, is still looking for her first callback.
Regardless of how the two dancers finish in Glasgow, they will continue dancing as long as their bodies will let them. After a lifetime of training, being Irish step dancers has become a fundamental part of their identities.
"We've known some of these girls since we were four and seven years old," O'Brien said. "Our teachers are so important to us; they're our role models."
