Dance Limerick to premiere Step Up 2025 production ‘I’d Like to Get to Know You’

Dance Limerick to premiere Step Up 2025 production ‘I’d Like to Get to Know You’. Photo by Luca Truffarelli

Dance Limerick is delighted to present the premiere of I’d Like to Get to Know You, a Step Up 2025 production by Philip Connaughton

Audiences in Limerick and beyond will have the chance to enjoy the newest piece by choreographer Philip Connaughton, ‘I’d Like to Get to Know You’, created to mark the 15th anniversary of the Step Up Dance Project.

The show will premiere at Dance Limerick on Wednesday, the 30th of July and will run for two more days before moving to Dublin, where the cast will offer a studio performance at DanceHouse.

Step Up Dance Project is a programme of professional development for Irish and Ireland-based recent dance graduates and early-career dance professionals in partnership between the Arts Council of Ireland, Dance Limerick, the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick and Dance Ireland.

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Each year, the selected artists spend their summer in the context of Dance Limerick and the Irish World Academy, training and refining their skills as performers with a different choreographer each year, as well as guest teachers, artists and mentors. The aim of the programme is to help develop and showcase the work of the next generation of Irish dance talent. To date, over 80 dancers have benefited from the programme, building vital networks and gaining the experience necessary to sustain a professional career in dance.

Choreographer Philip Connaughton and rehearsal director Lucia Kickham have been working with dancers Alice Gavigan, Sophie Gray, Ciara Hannon, Luke Maziarek and Catriona O’Connor to create a piece to celebrate the culmination of this 15th edition of the programme. I’d Like to Get to Know You explores the often-impossible task of bridging the gap between the artist and the outside world.

At the heart of all of Connaughton’s choreography—whether explicit or understated—lies a deep thread of isolation. The very impulse to perform arises from his own longing to reconnect with something that feels lost. The beauty of the work is not in resolving this tension, but in the attempt itself—in striving for the impossible, in refusing to give up, in the sheer act of doing.

Performances will also bear the imprint of all the artists that the dancers get to work with during the programme, widening their horizons and exploring new movement languages.

Guest teachers like Mary Nunan, Mufutau Yusuf and Justine Cooper a.o. are an integral part of the Step Up journey and this year for the first time, the participants have had the chance to participate in the Moving in Collaboration International Intensive with Luail – Ireland’s National Dance Company.

For two weeks, they will explore music and dance alongside other performers from the National company as well as Maiden Voyage Dance and over ten international choreographers and composers, bringing in a wealth of influences to the work.

Audiences are welcome to experience this energetic, surprising, unexpected dance piece that will give you food for thought… and laughter!

Performances take place on Wednesday 30 and Thursday 31 at 7.30 pm, Friday 1 August at 1 pm at Dance Limerick Performance Space, and Saturday 2 of August at DanceHouse, Dublin.

Tickets are available on the Dance Limerick website