While warming up in Fade Street Dance Studios, with sharp November sunlight streaming through the beautiful stained-glass windows, Irish ballerina Niamh O’Flannagain practices some stretches as she chats about life as a professional dancer.
‘’Ballet for me is my whole life, it is what I have known since I was five years old. Everything in my life revolves around the rehearsals, performances, and the people I work with,’’ Niamh says.
Being a professional ballet dancer is a combination of hard work, dedication, and talent. While a lot of young girls dream of being prima ballerinas, only a handful go through the journey that she has; from tutelage under Irish ballet royalty, Sinead Dunbar of The Dance Academy and Rachel Goode of The Goode School of Dance, to acceptance in 2014 to the prestigious Tring Park School for the performing arts in London where she received A levels while training in dance.
Niamh cites London as a city which inspired her due to the varied productions that were accessible for her to see while living there as a teenager. Niamh loves that live streaming of world-renowned productions to cinema means inclusion for everyone to the beauty of the dance.
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While sipping on a fresh café-quality flat white, made using the high-performing L’Or Barista, a capsule to cup coffee machine, set up in studio for after practice, she discusses the role that men and boys have in ballet and how that role is evolving; although there’s a way to go in encouraging young boys to participate, it’s no longer the case that the male is supporting the female- to lift her in her big moments. Name-checking the Irish Youth Ballet and their outstanding boys’ programme, she says boys now play a significant role, have their own character ark and equally large scenes.
She has been part of Ballet Ireland since 2018, and in between productions with them she has worked on various projects including spending summer 2022 with the famed Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria.
Currently part of Ballet Ireland’s Nutcracker Sweeties production at The Gaiety Theatre and touring throughout Ireland, Niamh is enjoying being part of the re-imagined adaption of the Tchaikovsky classic. She is enthusiastic about making ballet accessible for people who may not know their pas marché from their demi-plié but enjoy the art as part of a larger landscape of culture.
‘’It’s so important to keep things fresh and current. We want children to be able to watch and understand but also perform on a level that is interesting to their parents and grandparents’', she says.
In Nutcracker Sweeties Niamh plays the children’s mother in one performance and Frau Drosselmeyer in another. Describing being on stage and how it makes her feel, she says ‘’I love it, I get so much energy from the audience. We bring them on a journey without words, through movement and dance. Ballet technique is so precise, there must be so much control, so much focus but once you have that in place you can use it to move more freely; this Nutcracker production isn’t the traditional classical work that you know, it has a little more freedom and I’m really enjoying that’'.
A quick peek at Niamh’s Instagram page shows that she enjoys life outside ballet. Her reels are delightful - mixing music, dance moves and stunning topography. She’s a big hiker and being in nature with friends and family when she has spent a long stretch inside a theatre is calming for her.
Asked what film or book might accurately reflect a ballet dancers’ life, she mentions a docuseries named ‘First Position’ which follows the trajectory of six young ballet students through the world-famous competition called the Young America Grand Prix (YAGP). Niamh explains that although there is competition amongst a ballet troupe, there is also a huge amount of warmth and collaboration in creating something collectively.
Niamh explains her daily routine. Laughing, she says it is not quite the extreme, austere discipline depicted in the psychological horror film Black Swan, a fictitious story of a ballet company based in New York City - her routine while in rehearsals starts with a ballet class at 10am, this is time for training and warming up the body, and lasts until 11.30am, with a short break before stage rehearsal until 6pm.
The time between class ending and rehearsal beginning are often moments she uses to catch up with her friends and colleagues over coffee. Niamh’s own coffee preference is a flat white. Coffee to her represents down time and comfort and while she’s busy with rehearsals, bringing a coffee in her keep cup is the perfect way to start her morning. She sees a flat white as her treat and is a fan of the L’Or barista, designed by Khodi Feiz for the Dutch-based Feiz Design Studio, and it is beautifully simple to use. You press a button, and the machine then pumps hot water from an in-built reservoir, through the pod, and into a cup as coffee.
No need for faffing about with pots or a French press or having to leave the studio to grab one on the go for that matter. L’Or’s Barista Sublime is a stylish coffee capsule machine that delivers barista-quality drinks at home.
Unsurprisingly, for a ballerina, she also loves the clean, elegant lines of the machine. It fits perfectly into her life.
The L’OR BARISTA Sublime coffee machine is available in three colours: Piano Noir, Satin Blanc, and Sunset Rubis at €89.99 nationwide at Dunnes Stores, Tesco, and online at lorespresso.ie