PERFORM Festival: The Dance Schools on the Main Stage

PERFORM 2027 is at the Convention Centre Dublin on Saturday 30 and Sunday 31 January 2027. It's a weekend festival of dance, drama, singing and music for young performers, and dance schools from across Ireland bring their students to perform on its Main Stage. Below are the schools that have said they're going. Ticket news goes on the PERFORM 2027 listing.

Schools performing at PERFORM 2027

• Cork Youth Ballet Company, Cork: some of its dancers are performing on the Main Stage.

• Becky Sheil Dance, Kilmore, Co. Wexford: the school's new Elite team.

• Taaffe Training, Dublin: held in-house auditions for its PERFORM teams in November 2026.

• JMDA (Jennifer Milligan Dance Academy), Ballyclare: its routine "Hip Hip Chin Chin" won Group Performance of the Year at the Golden Dance Awards NI 2026, and the prize was a PERFORM Main Stage slot with no performance fee.

• Phoenix Stage School, Galway: on the Main Stage at 3pm on the Saturday, its fifth time performing at PERFORM.

• Ruth Shine School of Dance, Blessington: back at PERFORM after missing the 2026 festival.

If your school is performing and isn't here, let us know and we'll add it.

What happens at PERFORM

The festival's own line is "Sing, Act, Dance, Play", so ballet shares the weekend with jazz, contemporary, musical theatre, drama and singing. The Main Stage is given over to school performances, and the rest of the venue has workshops and masterclasses.

The first PERFORM was held at the RDS on 16 and 17 February 2019. College of Dance took part and wrote about the weekend: school groups on the Main Stage, masterclasses, talks, stands from colleges and stage schools, auditions, and summer school scholarships awarded at the event. Its own students danced jazz and contemporary pieces and sang musical theatre numbers over the two days.

It was still at the RDS more recently: Leinster School of Dance won Dance Performance of the Year at Dance Awards Ireland 2025 for its schools performance at PERFORM in the RDS. The 2027 festival is the first at the Convention Centre Dublin.

The organisers also run events during the year. In October 2026 they brought Layton Williams, who starred in Billy Elliot and Everybody's Talking About Jamie, to Ireland for musical theatre dance workshops in Northern Ireland, Dublin, Kildare and Cork.

Tickets

PERFORM sells tickets through Gr8 Tickets, linked from the festival's Instagram. Tickets for 2027 are not on sale yet. Times and prices will go on the PERFORM 2027 listing as soon as they are announced.