Feats of feet

Two worldly-wise youngsters are keen to turn a passion for Irish dance into a trophy as they high-step from Beijing to Boston this month, Mike Peters reports.

Christy and Erin Jensen savor the crowd's applause at Beijing's Chaoyang Park International Spring Festival. [PHOTOS BY FENG YONGBIN / CHINA DAILY]

If you want an expert at making loud sounds, just look for your average boy. At that age, toy guns are cool, and shooting fireworks is probably as close to heaven as it gets. But 14-year-old Christy Jensen is not your average teen. He can create what sounds like a volley of machine-gun fire - and often does - simply by getting out on stage and letting his feet fly.

Christy and his 12-year-old sister, Erin, are competitive Irish dancers, and at this time of the year their schedule is packed. That's the case even though they now live in Beijing, where "faith-and-begorrah" is seldom heard.

While their dances are Irish, the young twosome doesn't claim that they bleed green, as the saying goes.

"We are originally from the UK," says their dad, Mike Jensen, who recently retired from the oil-and-gas industry. "The kids were born in the Netherlands, and we lived in Houston, Texas for four years before moving here. That's the oil business."

His wife Moira still works for Royal Dutch Shell, which brought the family to Beijing almost three years ago.

But if the youngsters weren't born on the Auld Sod, they adopted that country's famous footwork at a very young age.

"We were watching this amazing show on TV in the Netherlands," says Christy. The amazers were a squad of professional Irish dancers, and the amazees - then 6 and 4 years old - were tapping their shoes on the floor before the program was over. A year later, they were high-kicking a jig in their first festival.