One of the stars of the upcoming DanceLife Expo, tap dancer Daniel Leveillé, was born in Geneva and started tap dancingatthe age of 5. He won the IDO Tap Dance World Championships in the children category at age 8, and went on to win six more gold medals in the junior and adult solo categories between 2006 and 2013.
He also practiced Irish and ballroom dancing, and continues to study ballet, jazz and modern dance. He is a member of Fabrice Martin's Tap Dance Company, based in Lausanne (Switzerland), and performs in various tap shows touring Europe (Box-Son, Clap, Danse avec les Mots).
Daniel has taken classes and workshops inSwitzerland, Spain, France, Belgium and in the USA with many prominent tap dancers. At the Expo in Brno, he will teach as well as perform some of his tap numbers.
Taneční aktuality.cz asked him some questions before his visit to the Czech Republic.
How did you discover tap dance?I discovered tap dance when I was 4 or 5 through the movie White Nights with Mikhail Baryshikov and Gregory Hines. I fell in love with Baryshnikov’s style and wanted to start ballet, but my mother who was bringing my older sister to ballet classes every day, didn’t want to have the same situation with me. This is how I started tap dancing. What is the most important thing you learned from your dance teachers?
The most important thing I’ve learnt, not from my teachers but through them, is that your body can make a lot more than you actually think it can and if it can not do something, you can always invent something else to replace the movement if you are clever enough. If you believe in yourself, in your body, if you take care of yourself and if you have imagination, you can do whatever you want. How do you improvise with jazz musicians? What does it bring you and how do you connect with the musicians?
It’s hard to answer this question the same way it’s hard to say why someone likes to chat with some people and not with other ones! I guess that jazz musicians and tap dancers have the same « education »: everyday, we listen to the same music, we use the same words, we are curious. We speak the same language or at least, the same dialect so it’s easier to « connect » with each other.
Nevertheless, with each musician or band the conversation is different. Sometimes we discover interesting topics and we wander around them, sometimes we have nothing to tell each other so we stay each on our side, in our comfort zone or sometimes we go together in a place we both know and finally (when it happens, it’s magic), sometimes we go together on an adventure in a place we’ve never been to before.
Anyway, for these moments to happen, the same way in a conversation, it starts by listening to each other before talking.
Josef Bartos
Thank you for your thoughts. One got stuck in my mind – that passion makes us different from AI. Just yesterday I read…I am a dance critic. I am a member of an endangered species