Cork’s new Flatley knows Sky’s not really the limit

With talented troupe Prodijig, Alan Kennefick has his eye on the £250k prize on TV show Got to Dance, this weekend, writes Claire O’Sullivan

BY the time the car stopped outside the family home in Mayfield, the teenage boy in the back seat would have checked whether the coast was clear or not.

If it was, he’d let his mother open the front door and then he’d tear in the door and up the stairs. If it wasn’t — and his brothers or some of their friends were hanging around — he’d sit tight refusing to alight until they had dispersed.

Such routines were vital. Even in the post-Riverdance era, Irish dancing just isn’t cool. But when 27-year-old Alan Kennefick was young he had the added trauma of having to wear the obligatory kilt.

“Yes, kids can be cruel, ” laughs his older brother, Ian. “We all gave him such a wind-up. We’d be off playing chase and playing football and he was off in a kilt doing Irish dancing”.

“We used to mock him all the time,” says his other brother, Kieran. “He never went fishing with us or played soccer. It was all just dance. He’s never had a job, maybe for a week, that’s all. It was just all Irish dancing”.

“Seriously, you should have seen the way he’d leg it in from the car,” guffaws Ian.

It was out on the road outside their Silversprings home that 8-year-old Alan first learned to dance. His younger sister, Linda, had just started attending the McTeggart School of Dance in Cork city centre and practised her ‘one-two-threes’ up and down the road in the evenings. Soon she was teaching Alan and her friend Susan, who had been watching bemusedly from the kerb.

“Almost straight away he took to it,” says Linda. The first night he watched Linda perform at Cork Opera House, Alan nudged his mum: “I’d love to be up there”.

It took a couple of false starts before he, too, signed up to the McTeggart school, but within months it became clear the boy was a natural. Within a year he had won an All Ireland medal and he would go on to win English, Scottish, British National and North American championships, before he won his first world championship medal at 13.

Fast forward 14 years and Alan is part of the street/Irish dance dancing troupe Prodijig who are in this year’s live finals of Got To Dance on Sky One. If the seven-strong group win tomorrow night, they’ll pick up €250,000 and Alan will be well on his way to achieving his dream of being “the next Michael Flatley”. Already he and his girlfriend, Ciara McGillan, also part of Prodijig, have been lead dancers with Riverdance for nearly six years.

Alan’s sister, Linda, herself a holder of a world Irish dancing medal, and her boyfriend, Tony, will be part of the audience in London on Saturday night, but his mum and two brothers will be cheering from their Cork home.

“I’m inclined to make him very anxious when I’m in the crowd so I’m not going,” laughs his mum, Ann. “I don’t want to jinx him”.

Alan’s brothers Ian and Kieran, along with Linda, have spent the past few weeks spearheading a Facebook, YouTube and Twitter campaign to ensure that Alan comes out on top. It seems to be working as his dancing videos have garnered up to 250,000 hits. His mum and dad, Pat, have been nailing posters to telephone poles across Cork City. The family haven’t seen Alan since the week after Christmas as he’s been practising noon and night at the studio that Prodijig hired in Belfast and living in the nearby Prodijig apartment.

“He was an amazing talent with natural rhythm, but he was also a very, very hard worker. If I was making up a set piece and asked him to try something, the more difficult it was, the more he’d love it. He just loved something that he could bite into,” says Chris Ryan, who taught Alan at the Cowhie-Ryan school in Cobh from the age of nine.

“He wasn’t without faults, but as soon as he becomes aware of a fault, he corrects it. When I see him on TV I’ll look for his natural weaknesses and I’ll text him after ‘that foot was good today’. We get a laugh out of it. I really hope he goes all the way,” says Chris.

The whole Kennefick family talk of Alan’s drive and determination.

“He always just strives to be the best at what he does. If he comes second or third, it’s always ‘why didn’t I do better? What did I do wrong?’” says Ann.

But at 16, a pupil at Christian Brothers, Sydney Place, Alan decided he was finished with Irish dancing. He couldn’t take the taunting anymore.

“He was never going to get the same attention as Roy Keane did around here,” says Ann. “He got into skateboarding, then breaking every bone in his body before going to CIT to do draughtmanship! He hated it. though. And one day he arrived home and said ‘Mum, I’m going back to do what I’m good at’. A week later he was part of Michael Flatley’s Celtic Tiger show in Dublin.”

After Celtic Tiger, he transferred to ‘Magic of the Dance’. He then joined Riverdance about six years ago where he was lead singer until last autumn when he didn’t renew his contract as he wanted to concentrate on the Prodijig plan.

“He was home last summer but he was always trying out something to do with Prodijig on the laptop. He’d just be messing away in the front room with graph paper and a pen creating dances. He designed all the costumes too,” recalls Ann.

She admits she’s become obsessed with Got to Dance, and says there isn’t a minute when she’s not thinking about Saturday night.

“A lot of people haven’t realised that Alan is from Ireland and from Cork and from Mayfield. It would be great if more people knew it and tuned in on Saturday night and voted. This is his dream being up there with his own group. This is his chance to be the next Michael Flatley.”