There wasn't a dry brow at the end of the workshop with Cathal Keaney, who plays the Lord of the Dance in the upcoming production. "There were some people who said they had done Russian dancing and a bit of tap dancing before, but Irish dancing – it might look easy sometimes but it's not, it's very tricky," he said.

A puffed-out Melany Laycock said the performers had shown them a few "good moves". "It's hard work, I don't know how they do it, how they keep it up all that time. So it's pretty amazing," she said.

For Brad Sherman, it was not a first attempt at Irish dancing but it might be his last for a while. "The basic concepts were familiar, but that was 30 years ago. And the mind is willing but the body is less capable than it once was," he said.

Michael Flatley's Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games opened in Canberra on Tuesday.