Welcome to the Friends of McGahan Lees Irish Dance Academy website.
This site is intended for Irish dancers all over the world -- from pre-feis beginners to world championship contenders. Family and friends of dancers, and anyone thinking of starting Irish dancing lessons, should also find it of great interest -- especially the beginners area. Have a good look round!
Please note that this site is maintained by dancers' parents - NOT a qualified dance teacher (click 'read me!' on the top menu bar for more details).
As many of you may have seen, a group of older McGahan Lees championship class dancers appeared on the GMTV programme "Britain's Got Talent" on 2nd June.
The girls appeared as "The Rainbow Dancers", and formed a stunning backing team for Jimmy Forde. Sadly, Jimmy didn't get through to the finals, but the girls had a great time nevertheless and met all of the stars, including Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden, Louie Walsh, and Ant and Dec of course.
We're hoping to get some pictures as soon as we can, so watch this space!
We had an amazing time at our 9th Open Feis in Chelmsford on 13-14 March, 2010. It was good to see old friends and to make new ones, and we hope all of our competitors and their families had a good weekend. Thank you to everyone who worked or helped, danced or supported. Without you our feis would not have been the success it was. Special thanks go to those who travelled long distances to be with us. Your efforts to join us are much appreciated, and we hope to see you again next year.
We are proud to announce that Debbie Leavens (née McGahan) has passed her TCRG exam. Everyone who knows Debbie will already be aware of her dedication and love for Irish dancing, and her ability to pass on her own skills to the next generation of dancers. Debbie is well known within our community, both as a world-championship standard dancer, and as a long-term member of Riverdance, and we are sure that everyone, both within and outside the McGahan Lees Academy, would want us to pass on their congratulations to Debbie.
We are receiving a number of membership requests that are obviously from people who have nothing to do with Irish dancing, and we are just as obviously rejecting these. However, the only way we can judge whether these requests are genuine or not is by looking at the chosen username and the email address supplied.
A bunch of McGahan Lees dancers met up on Saturday for a brilliant day letting off steam at Thorpe Park. We're still waiting for pictures of everyone who went, but this crazy bunch is probably representative.
CLICK THE PICTURE!
We now have our new photo gallery up and running -- see the link beneath the banner heading, above.
We've sorted out a few of the photographs from the old site, but we really need good, new pictures of McGL dancers -- any age, any grade -- so if anyone has any to send us, please email them.
A small reminder -- wherever you see a photograph on the site, clicking it will usually bring up a larger version.
We love this pic of two pairs of sisters at the North American Irish Dance Championships. Click the 'Read More' link to find out who they are, and click the picture to see a larger version!
Regular visitors will know that this website has been out of action for two months following a serious attack by hackers. Our apologies that it has taken a long time to go live again, but we needed to be sure that our younger visitors were not going to find themselves being redirected to an inappropriate site from a hacked page.
Now that we are up and running, we will gradually add all of our content back - but we are taking this opportunity to update and rewrite where appropriate. The look and feel of the site will also evolve over time, so watch this space!