Dance Bio of Luca
Daniel
Luca Daniel started his dance
career in 2001 at the age of 30 and has been training exclusively since then
with his coach Armin Kappacher. During
his first two years Luca danced with Katya Lesnaia winning several North East
collegiate competitions at the syllabus levels. Subsequent partners included
Tilke Judd, Maria Vertkin (Yale2005 and Tufts2005 Latin championship
finalists), and Yuhan Ai and Sally Myers (2006 South East United States Latin
Champions). Recently Luca is actively competing in the Latin S1 division with
Dance Pictures and Video
Galleries
·
2007: Luca Daniel & Efrosyni Iosiphidis
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2007: Luca Daniel
& Yuhan Ai
·
2006: Luca Daniel & Sally Myers
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2005: Luca Daniel & Maria Vertkin
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2004: Luca Daniel & Tilke Judd
·
2003: Luca
Daniel & Katya Lesnaia
A few words about
myself…
Up to
2001 I had no dance experience of any kind. I can still get rather amused if I
painfully try to recall those fortunately few, yet remarkably embarrassing
attempts in a disco dance club back when I was still living in
Then one
day... out of the blue, I decided to turn it all around. I joined the MIT dance
competition team. "No experience needed." That's how they got me. At
first I honestly thought I was just up to some agonistic challenge, mixed with
the pleasant side-effects of getting some fun body exercise while learning a
useful social skill. However, it became clear to me soon after I started
working closely with Armin that dancing in his studio is not at all just about
moving your hips more or less on time :) I would better describe it as ride on
a roller coaster of emotions. As Armin would put it, what is really supposed to
move your hips are your feelings, and dancing is helping, if not virtually
forcing me to discover, accept, and to embrace all of them.
I have a
fairly stressful, sometimes truly overwhelming job (and who doesn't these
days...). I had to learn to repress emotions in order to become more productive
at it. Although professionally effective, this strategy in the long term had
proven to be utterly detrimental for my personal life. You can hence imagine
how pleasantly surprised I was to find in Armin's approach to dancing a strong
encouragement to reconnect to those suppressed emotions and feelings. After
some long initial struggle I have now finally managed to leave behind all those
heavy bags of stress that I seemed to be masochistically taking with me
everywhere I went. What a relief… J
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Last Updated February, 2008.