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Danny Daniels [biography]
Dates: 1924-
Birth Date: Oct 25, 1924
Place of Birth: Albany, New York
Danny Daniels, dancer, choreographer, director, and teacher was born Daniel Giagni, Jr., the son of Daniel, Sr. and Mary (Bucci) Giagni. He began dancing at the age of five and-a-half, after seeing the tap dancing of Fred Astaire on film. His father enrolled him as a student of Tommy Sternfeld, his first tap dance teacher in his hometown of Albany, New York. He also studied ballet in Albany and with teachers at the American Ballet School in New York. He went professional at the age of nine, dancing in clubs and private parties in and around the Albany area. At age fourteen he made his film debut dancing with Bing Crosby in The Star Maker (1939), and at age sixteen he made his Broadway debut in the George Abbot musical Best Foot Forward (1941) with choreography by Gene Kelley. He subsequently danced leading roles on Broadway in many shows, receiving Tony nominations for Billion Dollar Baby (1946) and Street Scene (1947). From 1950 to 1954 Daniels taught tap dance at the Jack Stanley Dance School in New York, his teaching serving as his bread and butter while not working on Broadway.
In 1952 Daniels collaborated with the distinguished American composer Morton Gould on the creation of the Tap Dance Concerto, a fusion of tap dance with ballet which consisted of four movements and called for twenty minutes of dancing. He danced this work with all the major symphony orchestras in this country, as well as in London and Berlin with the London Philharmonic and the Berlin Symphony. This concerto was an innovation, as it brought tap dancing to a concert level that had never before been achieved.
On Broadway Daniels choreographed over fourteen musicals. He received a Tony award and an Astaire Award for his outstanding choreography for The Tap Dance Kid (1984), and Tony nominations for All American (1962), High Spirits'(1964), Walking Happy (1966), and Annie Get Your Gun (Lincoln Center revival, 1966). He began directing with a revival of Best Foot Forward (1963) which launched the career of a young new talent, Liza Minelli. Daniels' choreographic work can be seen in such films as Pennies From Heaven, Woody Allen's Zelig, Stephen Spielberg's Indiana Jones, and Stepping Out with Liza Minelli. He has choreographed over 200 television shows for such stars as Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, Dick Van Dyke, Bing Crosby, and Gene Kelly, who asked Daniels to dance with him and choreograph for his last television special, thus completing a cycle that began with Daniels' first Broadway show thirty years earlier.
"The difference between rhythm tap dance and Broadway-style tap dance is that Broadway tap can't use that individual improvisational style unless you have a jam session," Daniels explained to Melba Huber. "When you have a lot of people dancing together, they have to dance in close coordination with each other." Daniels attributes his roots in tap dance to English and Irish style of clog dancing. "Hal LeRoy, Gene Kelly and myself, our roots are Lancashire Clog dance," he told Jane Goldberg in a 1984 interview. "The roots of what black people do are street dancing. They took this Lancashire clog dancing and they transformed it into a kind of improvisational style. . . . . But Honi Coles dances the way I dance-- his feet work pretty much like mine. Somehow or the other he got his training when he was very young from a traditional tap dancer from Lancashire clog. Some say you can't count in tap dancing, but anything that's done to any kind of rhythm can be counted. That's the way music is done, and every beat of a tap dance can be put into a musical phrase, a musical notation. It's all mathematics."
Daniels has continued to promote tap dance's large inheritance from the Irish and Irish step dancing. When asked by Jane Goldberg about what he thought about the African contribution to tap dance he replied: "Tap dancing came from the Irish step dancers from England and the Africans picked up their footwork and used their own rhythms to it. They changed a little of the rhythmic structure, but its origin is Ireland." Even when Goldberg tried to present a compromise about the merging of the African and Irish musical and dance traditions that evolved tap dancing in America, Daniels clarified his belief: "Well, no, they were doing Irish step dancing in Ireland a long time ago; it's really traditional Irish dancing." When Goldberg asked if he disagreed with the statement that "tap is black," Daniels answered: "Absolutely. It isn't black; it's Irish."
In 1974 Daniels decided to start a dance company of his own, one that would explore dance forms indigenous to this country, specifically tap. He realized he would have to train his own dancers, thus opening his school in Santa Monica, California, with his wife Bea and eldest son D.J. Giagni. There, he began to train dancers; three years later the Danny Daniels Dance America Company made its debut in Los Angeles. The company toured with John Denver, toured nine states in the western United States on a Columbia Community Concerts Tour in 1977, and made many concert appearances in Los Angeles, delighting audiences with a history of tap dancing.Daniels also produced four records of music specifically to teach tap dance with, and a series of video tapes recording his routines for tap dance.
In the 1980s Daniels was back living in New York, teaching at Broadway Dance Center and establishing a reputation as an excellent tap dance teacher and choreographer.In the 1990s, in his seventies, Daniels began compiling a complete syllabus of dancing for teachers, dancers and the future generation. He also produced films with camera work that tracked tap dancing, and in 2004 performed in the Dean Hargrove-directed film short Tap Heat, featuring veteran tap dancer Arthur Duncan and young talent Jason Samuels Smith.
[Sources: Jane Goldberg, "An Interview With Danny Daniels" FootPrint (Fall 1984); Melba Huber, "Danny Daniels Taps with the Stars," Dance and the Arts (July/August 1996); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]