The music starts but she doesn’t move – not yet.
Standing on stage in Glasgow, Scotland, Lynnmour resident Mackenzie Cross is competing in the World Irish Dancing Championships.
She’s done her hard shoe routine and her soft shoe but the most important dance – the set dance – is the one she’s waiting for.
She’d been in this spot before but it always seemed to end in frustration.
The top 15 dancers have a world medal strung around their necks but Cross had been stuck somewhere south of medal contention for the last couple years.
“I was always ... so close,” she says.
But for the last three years that dangling medal was: “just out of reach.” It’s been frustrating, she notes. But it’s also given her motivation.
“It’s always really rewarding to ... get back from that,” she says.
Standing on the world stage is an ambition Cross has nursed and nurtured since she did her first pliè.
She was about three years away from kindergarten when she found her first love: ballet.
She’s always been a “fairly serious kid,” she explains. And so while other dancers might have been all wide eyes and big smiles, Cross says she was competitive.
At six years old she first heard the jigs and reels that have shaken more pub floors than shifting tectonic plates.
“I always connected with the music more in Irish dancing,” she says. “Ballet’s very, very rigid and serious and I felt like – not that I couldn’t have fun in ballet – but I could have more fun with Irish dance.”
She danced at Seymour Dance, the Nora Pickett Irish Dance Academy, and more recently at the Watt School of Irish Dance in Vancouver.
A competitor by nature, Cross says she’s been chasing awards since she was seven.
“You just always wanted a medal,” she says.
She danced all over the United Kingdom and the United States, eventually working up the world championships.
“I don’t really know what it was about this year,” she says. “But something clicked.”
Between pursuing a degree in human kinetics, Cross spent her time in the gym, working on the plyometric drills necessary for Irish dancing. It’s an art form, but it’s also a sport.
“It’s like doing a sprint for a minute and a half,” Cross says.
For her set dance, Cross danced to “The Four Masters.” The routine utilizes high kicks and the en pointe technique she’d learned in ballet.
For 90 seconds she kicked, leaped, tapped and dazzled.
In a competition that attracted dancers from Ulster, Ireland to Munster, Germany from the Midlands of England to the mid-Atlantic United States, Cross earned fifth place.
“Finally, this year, I did it,” she says.
