Notre Dame magazine

A gleaming silver trophy cup takes up an entire corner of Caitlin Allen's desk in her Pasquerilla East dorm room. The inscription reads, "Seis Na Nolled, First Place, 1997."

When asked about it, the freshman wrinkles her nose slightly and laughs.

"Oh, that's just for junk," she says and tosses a pencil into the cup.

Allen is understandably matter-of-fact about trophies. "Seis Na Nolled" is the name of an Irish step dance competition covering New York and New Jersey, small potatoes for Allen. At 19 she has already toured for a year with Riverdance's lead North American company as the troupe's youngest member, been the North American champion in Irish dance the past two years and the American champion the last five.

Not bad for someone who took up Irish dance just because it looked like fun.

"I saw my cousin doing it at a party and asked for lessons," says Allen, who was 4 at the time of the party.

She got her lessons -- first at a school near her home in Yorktown Heights, north of New York City in Westchester County; later, when the nearby school closed, out on Long Island, a 90 minute drive each way. In addition to the long commute, by the time she reached high school she was practicing for up to three hours a night and working to pay for costumes, shoes and transportation to competitions.

Not all of her free time was spent on work, dance competitions and practice, though. She won a bit part as an Irish dancer in The Devil's Own, a 1997 Brad Pitt-Harrison Ford movie filmed in Manhattan. The director was looking for a 12-year-old girl. She was 17 at the time, she says, but "I told them I was 14." The director decided that she could pass for 12, so she got the part.

Allen didn't hear until June C long after she had accepted her admission to Notre Dame C that she had been selected to fill the only opening in the original Riverdance company. She decided to defer college for a year rather than miss what might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tour with the company.

The tour started that August in Boston and didn't end until one week before she had to enroll at Notre Dame in August 1998. Stops included New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Saint Louis, New Haven and Cleveland. Allen was the youngest of the 20 female members of the troupe; there were also 12 males. The average age of the dancers was about 24.

It was tough getting over that initial feeling of being an outsider, she recalls. "There were only three Americans . . . [and] about 85 percent of them [had been] together since the start [of Riverdance] three years ago."

While at Notre Dame, Allen, who is 100 percent Irish-American and proud of it, has continued her involvement with Irish dance, teaching group and private lessons at a South Bend school, Julie Showalter's World Academy. And she still performs. She joined the Riverdance troupe in Boston for the week over fall break last October and remains on the company's "flying squad," a roster of backups called in when a regular troupe member is unable to perform.

-- Meredith W. Salisbury

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