Evolving in the jazz scene of New York, it was a ust for me to encounter the TAP DANCE world.
It was first more of a personal quest of incorporating jazz rhythm in the literal sense of feeling it permeate my body through dancing. So I went to take a tap dance class at “Woodpeckers” in Soho. There I met Hervé Legoff (www.lerythmeenmouvement.com) , one of the teachers, also french, with whom I soon started collaborating creating a show we called “Dansez sur moi”, meaning literally “Dance on me”, from the title of
Claude Nougaro’s song, and a French version of Neil Hefti’s “Girl Talk”. That song was of course included in the repertoire amongst other french songs and jazz standards rearranged for duo piano, voice and tap dance, sometimes including a bass player. The show was performed on various stages in New York, as well as Montreal and Paris between 1993 and 2000.
Ten years later, now both back in France, we are creating a completely new project based on Hervé’s choregraphies and some of my original compositions along with a couple of cover songs, namely the song in the title of the show, “Nous étions faits pour etre libres” (we were born to be free) based on Louis Aragon text with music by Marc Lebel.
Meanwhile while still in New York in 2002, I had the pleasure to work with another tapdancer and choregrapher, Stefanie Weber (http://fertileuniverse.com/about), who took me into her own tap world full of poetry and imagery using a very personal vocabulary of sound and movement, rich in sense and symbolism. Together we performed in a few local venues in Massachussets and created a show called “Noor Un Nisa” in honor of the famous courageous Sufi woman, daughter of the Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan. Since then she has used several of my compositions to create very original choreographies with her company.
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Last but not least, after crossing paths many times in the Tap Dance stages of New York and Paris, and meeting her again, as she was through a strange coincidence residing in Barcelona, Spain, at the same time than myself ( 2006-2011) I embarked in a new collaboration in yet another Tap world, the one of Roxane Butterfly (http://worldbeats.free.fr). Besides our interestingly similar geographical itineraries we discovered together numerous common musical inspirations, especially in the realm of fusion of jazz and world music. What followed was the creation of the show “Moodanza” performed at the festivals “Villa 5” in Torino and “Mediterraneo” in Genoa (Italy) in May and June 2009, and at Joe’s Pub in New York in July 2010.