A day in the life of … Riverdance’s Siobhan Manson

September 1, 2015

Published on 29/08/2015 on independent.ie   http://goo.gl/YH3iPf

‘We dance eight times a week, six days a week. If we are on tour we travel on Mondays, so we actually do eight shows a week. It is really hectic, we have two shows on Saturday and Sundays.
“If I am on tour, I don’t have to get up too early. We do shows at night so we don’t finish until 11pm, depending on where the show is.
“Right now we are in the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin and we are finished there on Sunday.
“The American tour starts at the end of September. This one is really long. It goes on until November, then we have a few weeks off and are back out again until the end of June.
“We usually sleep in a bit on tour and get up around 10am, in time for breakfast in the hotel. I try to get eight hours sleep every night. We need to make sure we are eating enough so trying to get breakfast, lunch and dinner is hard on tour.
“Our weekdays are almost like our weekends in that they are more of a break for us than the weekends.
“On a show day, we would go to the theatre for a massage about 4 or 5pm. Then we do rotations or troupe checks. The dance captain would get all the Irish troupe on stage and we would run through what is happening that night. It could change, depending on who is doing lead and all that. That can take up to an hour, sometimes we have drills.
“After troupe check then we would break and go and get ready, do our make up and that kind of stuff. I can do my make up in 15 minutes if I need to, but if I am really putting my back into it, it could probably take up to 30 minutes.
“We do our make up ourselves, we have had classes with MAC in the past where they teach us how to do different show makeup. When I have a day off, I just can’t wait to not put make up on. After the show, we would sometimes go for a drink. It depends on what city we are in. A lot of the time we would go for dinner. But that can be hard because it is late. But, that is what I like to do after the show. And then bed.
“We can eat what we want but we do eat quite healthily. We don’t have a strict diet, but we are pretty strict on ourselves anyways.
“The last tour I did recently was China. With the time difference in China, I found it tough to keep in contact at home.
“The internet in the venues is great so a lot of the time we would use that to keep in touch with home.
“The American tour starts in a few weeks, so I have a couple of weeks off with my family and friends.
“I am going to go over to London to see my sister, she lives there. It’s just the two of us and my parents, we’re from Galway.”
Interviewed by Emma Jane Hade