Irish dance made a surprise appearance during Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter stadium tour this summer. The show’s third act closed with “Flamenco,” a short, haunting song featuring the extraordinary dancer Kaitlyn Sardin.
As Beyoncé sang, Sardin—wearing a short blazer dress, a cowboy hat, ruffled white socks, and hard Irish dance shoes—began a solo at the stage’s center. When the pop star strutted off for a costume change, the music sped up, and Sardin’s feet flew to match the tempo. She was spotlighted on the jumbotron for the tens of thousands of fans in the audience; crowds cheered wildly throughout her solo, which at times broke away from traditional Irish dance form and ended in a strong flamenco pose.
Just months prior, Sardin was like any other Beyoncé fan, enduring massive queues and Ticketmaster glitches for a chance to see Queen Bey. “Literally, I was fighting for my life for these New York tickets,” Sardin says from her apartment, while on a brief break between the Paris and Houston legs of the tour.
Showcasing her unique style of Irish dance with one of the world’s biggest pop stars is a fitting career high for Sardin. In recent years, the technically accomplished Irish dancer, who was part of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” cohort in 2024, has carved out her own lane through social media, blending hard shoe Irish dance with hip hop, Afrobeat, vogue, and other styles. Performing with Beyoncé on the Cowboy Carter Tour—a genre-pushing project that blended country, Americana, and folk music—was the perfect fit for a dancer who thrives exploring the in-between.
While Sardin was unable to share many details about the tour, including how she was cast, she calls the experience “surreal.” Beyoncé is one of her biggest inspirations. “I was not expecting this at all,” Sardin says. “I’ve been so grateful and thankful because it just feels like a dream come true.”
Sardin, who grew up in Orlando, discovered Irish dance at age 6, when an Irish dance troupe performed during intermission at her ballet school’s recital. Immediately, she was drawn to the sound—the rhythmic clacking of the dancers’ shoes. “It really was the rhythm, being your own drum that inspired me,” she recalls.
After the recital, she asked her mom if she could try classes, and soon she enrolled at the Watters School of Irish Dance. In 2009, she participated in (and won) her first world championship competition, which pushed her to dedicate even more time to her training to reach the highest level of performance. She was particularly inspired by the dance-drama category of competition, which fuses Irish dance and theater.
Myra Watters, founder of the Watters School and Sardin’s first teacher in the style, says Sardin shone in dance dramas. “Any role you gave her, she just owned and went for. There was no holding back,” Watters says. “You never had to pull a performance out of her—she was just ready to go.” Dancers at the studio could also choreograph their own routines for St. Patrick’s Day shows, Watters says, another area where Sardin stood out: “She was so creative and fearless—adding any elements from any form of dance into her routines and making them so entertaining for the audience.”
As a student at the University of South Florida and Hofstra University in New York, Sardin continued her training in Irish dance off campus. Although she stopped competing in 2019, at Hofstra, she started experimenting with other styles of dance through a club where members would explore a new style every week, including hip hop, contemporary, and dancehall. The club offered an opportunity to break out of the mold of Irish dance—the stiff upper body, pin-straight arms, jumps from fifth with straight legs. Sardin could literally loosen up, incorporating more plié and a bit of swag into her movement.
In 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, Sardin went all-in on blending Irish dance with other styles. She felt inspired to start Irish dancing again because of Beyoncé’s Black Is King musical film, a vibrant celebration of Black culture and African tradition. “This was a year after I quit competing, and I was like, ‘Why did I stop Irish dancing? I still love it,’ ” Sardin says.
She began posting more of her fusion choreography on social media (she’s @kaitrock on both Instagram and TikTok)—short clips of her dancing on a wooden board to the music of pop artists like SZA, Charli XCX, and Tinashe. On the surface, the dance styles she pulls from seem disparate, but it’s the rhythm, the percussion, that helps them blend seamlessly. “There’s just something about the syncopation of your movement with the music,” Sardin says. “In Afrobeat, your body’s moving through the drums that you can hear in the background of each song. That’s very similar to Irish dancing, where you’re finding that extra hit of a song where you can add an extra beat.”
Her first big spike in TikTok followers came in 2022, when she shared an old competition video featuring what she describes as an Irish dance version of the moonwalk. “The internet lost their mind,” Sardin says. She watched in awe as her follower count climbed from “20 thousand to 50 thousand to 80 thousand.”
As her audience grew—she now has over 100 thousand followers on both Instagram and TikTok—Sardin experienced the roller coaster of online celebrity. “Suddenly, I had so many people with perceptions of me just from these videos,” she says. For many, it was their first time seeing Irish dance. As a Black Irish dancer, her favorite comments come from people who say they never thought they could pursue Irish dance because of their race. “Then, as soon as they saw my video, they’re like, ‘This has made me so happy. I’ve been showing my daughters, and they’re interested in this,’ ” Sardin says. Comments also poured in from Irish fans, and even the Irish embassy, sharing how much they loved her dancing. The awe and encouragement from followers “helped me keep pushing and keep choreographing and posting,” Sardin says.
But building a following on social media also exposed her to racist critiques. Coming up in the Irish dance competition world, Sardin was one of very few Black dancers. “That was always weird,” she says. “It was a bit like never knowing where I fell in this space.” Still, she says, the competition world was always “super-welcoming,” and it wasn’t until recently, after her online platform grew, that she faced outright racism from her dancing. In 2024, when her dancing went viral on X (formerly Twitter), she experienced a huge wave of negativity. To overcome that intense criticism and hate, Sardin surrounded herself with friends. “I allowed myself to have some space to myself to recenter,” she says. “I had to bring myself back to why I love dancing, and I didn’t want these people’s words to stop me.”
Ultimately, Sardin has found that the pros of her presence on social media—an evolving showcase of her unique talent—outweigh the cons. Her viral fame has helped her land a number of opportunities, including performing at the Nantucket Dance Festival, improvising with jazz bands, and dancing in a yet-to-be-released film about the Supremes set in Limerick, Ireland. Last year, Sardin also performed in the North American premiere of What We Hold, a show that pays homage to the rich history of Irish dance, choreographed by former Riverdance star Jean Butler.
Butler, who now works between Irish and contemporary dance, was first introduced to Sardin’s work through an interview for Butler’s oral-history project documenting stories from the global Irish dance community. “The first time I was in the studio with Kaitlyn on my own, I just felt this real hunger from her,” Butler says.
For Irish dancers, there are limited opportunities to work professionally, other than niche shows like Riverdance. It can be an isolating experience, Butler says, making it even more impressive that Sardin found success charting her own course. “Kaitlyn had to do all her own work, she had to make all her connections,” Butler says. “She had to figure out who her influences were going to be. Irish dancing is such a specific language, like so many other dance forms, except that people don’t know the language of Irish dance.” What Butler admires most about Sardin, she says, is that she’s “really clearly herself. She’s her own person and she has incredible style.”
Ask many dancers about their dream gig and dancing with Beyoncé is certain to be a top response. It was also Sardin’s dream. And after wrapping the Cowboy Carter Tour this summer, bringing Irish dance to a mainstream, global audience, what’s next? Sardin plans to continue training in hip hop, pointing out that it’s an expansive style that includes numerous subgenres. She wants to expand her repertoire by learning salsa, samba, and other ballroom styles.
Another dream is to create a collective of dance artists who, like her, also exist in the in-between—a space to experiment and try things outside the norm. She hopes it will allow them to “just feel safe to create and not be worried about what they look like,” Sardin says. “I want them to have that freedom to be innovative and to try something new.”
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