Knights says that at his very first lesson, he learned about toes, heels and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. In the same way Bruce taught her, Bruneau ensures her students pay reverence to tap legends before them, or the people “whose shoulders you stand on,” she said in an episode of Knights’ Tap Love Tour podcast (a passion project of Knights’ in which he interviews tap dancers from across the globe about the history and artistry of the style). She came to Montreal in 1953 and never left, singing and dancing in dozens of clubs and making a name for herself before founding the Ethel Bruneau Tap Dance School in the early ’60s.īruneau considers herself a preacher, teaching the gospel of tap dancing to her disciples. She trained at Mary Bruce’s School of Dance from the age of three, where she grew up dancing with Hines. The iconic Bruneau, also known as Miss Swing, has been tap dancing for more than 80 years and teaching for more than 60. “And this old Black woman from Harlem, New York, was teaching.”
I walked up these stairs as if I was ascending into heaven,” says Knights. One of her friends suggested Bruneau – Montreal’s queen of tap – who wasn’t listed in the phone book. When he asked his mother if he could take tap lessons, she started asking around to find a class for him. The second miracle was Knights’ introduction to Ethel Bruneau. Two decades later, his name nearly rivals the acclaim of the latter legends he’s worked with Warner Brothers, Cirque du Soleil, the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, Tapestry Dance Company, the Vancouver International Tap Dance Festival and more.
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The renowned Canadian tap dancer’s professional career started in 2000, when he was cast as a principal dancer in the film Bojangles starring Hines and Savion Glover.
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This was the first miracle in a series of many that Knights says defined his dance journey. The effort failed: hockey was “a nightmare,” he says, and baseball “a little bit better but also a nightmare.” (To this day, Knights says team sports are still alien to him.) But when he saw Davis and Hines tap together, his interest was piqued. It’s a secret language that can’t be described, only spoken through rhythm.”Īt the time, Knights’ parents had put him in team sports, hoping to find him a hobby that would help him get over his shyness. “We call it tap, but I think ‘the form’ that I’m enchanted by is unsayable.
It was alive, extra-dimensional,” Knights writes in an email. “I had seen tap dance in the movies before, but what Sammy and Gregory were doing was different.
Knights watched the tape of that performance (originally broadcast in 1990) repeatedly, leaving him in awe of the art form. What happened next is what Canadian tap legend Travis Knights describes as “a rhythmic conversation,” as Davis and Hines improvised intricate rhythms back and forth, accenting and enlivening the simple jazz piano melody being played. But something magical happened: Davis slipped on his tap shoes and joined Hines onstage. He couldn’t speak during the celebration as he was undergoing radiation. It was one of Davis’s last public performances he would pass away from throat cancer the following May. The performance was part of Sammy Davis Jr.’s 60th Anniversary Celebration, a prime-time tribute to the Rat Pack member’s career in show business. Then with his tap shoes as his pen, every word, every pause and detail of Hines’ tribute resonated through the venue. “I feel so much love for you that I’m going to try and dance it out, for you,” Hines said to Davis, who was sitting in the audience. through the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. In November 1989, Gregory Hines delivered a rhythmic love letter to Sammy Davis Jr.
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