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 and visiting coach
Nadia Eftedal.
During his first two years Luca danced
with Katya Lesnaia winning
several NorthEast 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). Luca competed in the Latin S1
division with Efrosyni Iosiphidis
(2006 South East Regional Champions, 2006 Ohio Star Ball Champions, 2007
Manhattan Amateur Classic Champions, 2007 North East
Regional Champions). Luca and Efrosyni
represented the
Dance
Pictures and Video Galleries
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2008: Luca Daniel & Efrosyni Iosiphidis
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2007: Luca Daniel & Yuhan Ai
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2006: Luca Daniel &
Sally Myers
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2005: Luca Daniel & Maria Vertkin
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2004: Luca Daniel & Tilke Judd
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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…
Back to:
For questions or comments please write to Luca Daniel: luca@mit.edu.
Last
Updated September, 2009.