BY JOE MCNAMEE
AISLING BRANGAN is nervous about this interview.
Last March, the 16year-old travelled to London to audition for the renowned Central School of Ballet.
In front of a panel of five judges and a large group of her peers she had to perform routines she had never before encountered.
Securing a place in the school wasn’t sufficient — she needed to dance well enough to be offered a scholarship.
And here she is, knots in her stomach at the prospect of an idle natter with a crumbling old hack.
Aisling, from Leixlip in Co. Kildare, first skipped the light fantastic at four but as an Irish dancer in a country newly intoxicated by Riverdance.
“She was an absolutely superb Irish dancer,” recalls her mother, Eileen Brangan, “really light on her feet, but she hated it, every single moment, and she asked if she could do ballet, all her friends were doing it. We said, give it six months and if you still really want to do it, we’ll let you. But she kept on and on about it for those next six months.” As for Aisling, she was in her element: “It suited my personality a lot more,” she says. “In Irish dancing you had to keep your arms by your side whereas in ballet you are allowed to express yourself more.”
In Ireland, where there is no national vocational dance training centre, a young ballet dancer feeds on crumbs compared to their counterparts in Britain. Aisling took sustenance where she could and Irish ballerina Monica Loughman was a big inspiration.
Happy enough with her auditions she returned home to Leixlip but days stretched into weeks and nothing came back from London. Then one evening in May, she was at her desk looking for an email about a school project.
“It was a Wednesday, after a very hard ballet class,” says Aisling. “I was tired and feeling very low about the whole situation. Then I spotted something in my inbox. I ran down to my dad and mum and said, ‘can you come here for a second?’ I think everyone was in shock. I was running around the place screaming.”
She had been offered a full scholarship — the latest of the mere handful of Irish students to have been accepted throughout Central’s history.
Aisling is a middle child, sandwiched by Emma, 18, and Sinead, 13. She was also a very good student, pulling off an excellent
Junior Cert. Suddenly, dad Gerry and mum Eileen had to consider the very real prospect of their young daughter not only abandoning the Leaving Cert but leaving home.
“We sort of got snowballed into this whole thing,” says Eileen. “I would advise any parent to think long and hard about it before going down this road, especially if you are going to wind up with a child going away from home at 16.”
In September, Gerry and Eileen travelled to London with their daughter, settling her in to the Central-recommended hostel, 10 minutes’ walk from the school.
“When they were going back, I was thinking more of the following day, the first proper day at school,” says Aisling. “Of course, a few days later, it all came crashing down, how much I was missing my family and home.”
But, being Aisling, she dealt with that pain, throwing herself into classes and making a whole new bunch of friends. Early January and mum Eileen is just back from Dublin Airport, having seen Aisling off for spring term.
The tears are still fresh on her cheeks and her chipper tone is plainly trying to navigate a course between overwhelming pride in her daughter’s guts and achievements and the still dawning realisation that Aisling really has fled the nest.
“We thought it was just a pipe dream and she would come home at Christmas saying, ‘look, I gave it a try but it’s just not for me and I’m coming home’ — but not a bit of it. We are still coming to terms with the whole thing.”
Aisling, however, has already come to terms with it. And you suspect she might need to get more used to doing interviews in the future.