A HIP-HOP dance school from Crumlin are gearing up to compete in the international finals in Arizona, USA – after winning two gold medals for Ireland.
PXD dance crew are part of FADD dance and drama studios based in Craigavon but offer classes in Crumlin, Portadown and Belfast. The dance group trained hard and eventually took home two golds in the recent All-Ireland competitions in Dublin. Now having qualified to represent Ireland they are planning on raising the money needed to compete in the World Hip-Hop Dance Championships in Arizona from 30 June to 6 July.
Olivia McAteer, whose daughter Arabella Crawford (16), is part of the winning group, said: “PXD attended the Hip-Hop Internationals in Dublin. It’s the most prestigious dance competition in the Hip-Hop world and it’s referred to as the Olympics of dance. They were up against ten crews in the Varsity section (ages 12-18) and 32 crews in the Mini Crew (three members) section and got two golds for Ireland, coming first. They’ve now earned their place to attend the Worlds which are held in Arizona, USA."
CELEBRATIONS: PXD celebrating their win in Dublin
Olivia continued: “They were competing with dance crews from Derry, Dublin, Louth and all over the island. The dance routines are all choreographed by Fiona Bawn-Thompson.
“They qualified in 2019 as well and brought out 18 kids. One of their biggest influences is IMD Legion who were on Britain’s Got Talent and their dance teacher Omar came over to teach our kids.”
Fiona Bawn-Thompson said: “We’ve qualified to represent Ireland in Arizona just depending on if we can get enough raised to get over there. We will be setting up a donation page to help us with the cost and it will be coming soon.”
“The dance group is called PXD. FADD was set up in 2008 and was established as a performing arts academy. We started competitions in 2014. I don’t have a Hip-Hop background, my background is in Irish dancing and drama as well as acting but we all loved the competitiveness of Hip-Hop so we grew from that and started getting bigger and bigger. We went out to Vegas in 2014 representing Ireland and got to the semi-finals. We were the only team from Europe in the Junior section.
“In 2019 we brought out five teams to Vegas. We were the only dance school in the whole world to bring five teams over. Some of the dance schools across the world are huge. You’re competing against the likes of the Royal Family and Parris Goebel in New Zealand who have taken part in Justin Bieber’s music videos. It’s quite daunting going up against some of these huge dance schools, some of whom just go to school to dance, as some of them are training 60 hours a week so it’s brilliant to be a small school and get out there and compete against them.”
“The Hip-Hop dance community are very supportive of everyone taking part. There is a lot of competition but also a lot of support. The kids absolutely love it and it is a lot of hard work but when they come together as a team it makes all the hard work pay off.”
