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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2018:
Luca Daniel & Jennifer Courtney
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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…
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Last Updated September, 2009.