Pro class with Orla McCarthy

Orla McCarthy is an Irish freelance dance artist working across performance, choreography, and teaching. She trained at Shawbrook, Ireland, and holds a BA in Contemporary Dance from the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts.

She has worked across Ireland, Germany, and the Netherlands, performing with choreographers including Meg Stuart, Connor Schumacher, Luke Murphy, Catherine Young and Arno Schuitemaker. She was a company member with Dance Theatre Heidelberg under Iván Pérez for four years. Since 2018, she has developed her own multidisciplinary work for stage and screen. Her practice centres on the potential of dance to connect, support, and transform, engaging movement as a shared human experience and a space for awareness, presence, and healing. Her work has been presented internationally, including at CINEDANS, Amsterdam, Dock11 Berlin, and Theater Zwinger Heidelberg. Her current project Wit & Whimsy: Yin & Collapse, co-created with Majon van der Schot, will premiere at Dublin Fringe Festival 2026. Her previous work I am the machine, with Nina Hynes, premiered at Dock11 as part of ZEITGEIST IRLAND. Alongside her artistic practice, she is a teacher and somatic practitioner trained in qigong and yin yoga.

Orla’s class explores fluidity, presence and responsiveness through contemporary dance, improvisation and somatic practice. Through physical exercises, games and improvisational tasks, we’ll explore weight, momentum, off-balance states and recovery, working with different physical states rather than fixed forms. Together we’ll look for greater ease and freedom in the body, while staying present, playful, curious and creatively responsive in the moment.