B.C. teen wins Highland dancing world championship in Scotland

A 17-year-old from British Columbia has won a world championship Highland dancing event in Scotland, the birthplace of the dance form.

Annalise Lam, from the Brigadoon Dance Academy in Nanaimo, B.C., placed first in the junior championship at the Cowal Highland Gathering in Dunoon last Saturday.

The teenager has been practising Highland dance for over a decade, and qualified for the event in Scotland after winning the Canadian championship in Regina in July.

Lam beat Australian Morven Johnston and Nova Scotian Olivia Burke for the junior title, which is limited to teenagers under the age of 18.

"I'm just over the moon, excited," she told Robyn Burns, host of CBC's All Points West.

"My friends won't let me forget it," she said, laughing. "I'm so proud of myself. And they are, too."

Dozens of people showed up at the Nanaimo airport to welcome Lam home, with one of her friends even bringing bagpipes to add a bit of Scottish atmosphere to her arrival.

"It was so much fun," Lam said.

Highland dancing is a form of competitive dancing that was developed in 19th-century Scotland, where men practised it as a battlefield ritual and also as a form of social storytelling. 

Today, women win nearly all of the major championships worldwide. In Dunoon, dancers had to compete in four categories set to bagpipe music and percussion: the fling, sword, seann triubhas and reel.

Lam's coach Diena Henry attended the championships along with another dancer from the academy, Keltie Willis — who, earlier in the same trip, won medals at a Commonwealth competition in Stirling.

Leading up to the trip to Scotland, Lam finished second in the B.C. championships before her win at the nationals, which Henry says was the first for a Vancouver Island-born