The Irish Club of Belgium had announced a workshop with Aoife Garrard in its newsletter, which was picked up in the DAPO calendar, a fairly comprehensive calendar for traditional dancing in Wallony. The workshop was supposed to run from 10.00 to 17.00, but when it turned out that I was the only participant, we quickly arranged to go for a shorter, but well focused private lesson.

Aoife Garrard is a very talented, qualified Irish Dancing teacher from Limerick, currently staying in Belgium for a few months. I first saw her dancing at the end of a set dancing Ceili in Leuven. Here is a video (mpg; 9.3Mb) of that performance (at that time, I didn't know her name).

I was quite happy that she wanted to teach me the Munster version of the King of the Fairies, a traditional hornpipe set dance (to be honest, there seems to be some discussion on whether or not it is to be considered a traditional set dance, but for sure, it is an official set dance for An Coimisiun Competitions) which is here played (mp3) beautifully by the Sligo Fiddler John Vesey accompanied by Tom Standeven on the piano.

Here is a list of tunebooks in which it appears, available through the Folk Music Index. Abacci music collected also a number of disks on which the tune is played. On their site, it is played in slow reel tempo instead of a hornpipe. An interesting resource for the Irish dancer is the CD-Box 100% Pure Set Dance that contains all set dances at various speeds.

The set dance is explained on Olive Hurley's video Step by Step vol 3.