DANNY DANIELS

From Film Choreographers and Dance Directors by Larry Billman, and DannyDaniels.com...

"I started at five and a half, and by the time I was ten years old I had just about everything in my feet that I was ever going to have," said Danny Daniels in an April, 1980 Dance Magazine interview. One of the leading choreographers in contemporary stage and film work, he began tap lessons as a child in Albany, NY and continued studying various forms of dance over the years. He began his performance career at age 6 and when his jazz band musician father moved the family to Los Angeles, Daniels had a featured dance role in The Star Maker (1939). When the family relocated to New York, he debuted on Broadway in the choruses of Best Foot Forward (1941) and Count Me In (1942) and progressed to featured roles in Billion Dollar Baby (1945), Street Scene (1947), Make Mine Manhattan and Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and with the Agnes DeMille Dance Theatre in 1953. Anna Sokolow, the choreographer of Street Scene, was responsible for Daniels becoming a choreographer himself - his first works were for summer stock at Camp Tamiment from 1954-1955. His Broadway and television choreography led to his film career.

In Dance Magazine in December, 1965, he described the type of dance he most enjoys choreographing as "balletic jazz... Jazz plus the classic vocabulary adds up to a uniquely American style. Sure, it's a composite, but jazz has always been a composite, borrowing from many types of dance and turning them into something new and exciting. That's the kind of dance I'm comfortable in." He opened a dance school in Santa Monica in 1974 and formed Danny Daniels Dance America Company. Daniels also taped a historic series of demonstration-interviews with Louis DaPron, Fred Kelly (Gene's brother), Hal Leroy, Fayard Nicholas and other tap greats for the dance archives of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Public Library.

Daniels has been nominated for Broadway's coveted Tony Award for his choreography for Annie, Get Your Gun with Ethel Merman, Walking Happy, and High Spirits, and was awarded for the Broadway hit musical Tap Dance Kid, as well as receiving the DMA, DEA and the ASTAIRE awards. He has also received two Emmy citations for his outstanding TV choreography, and has been acclaimed for the films Pennies From Heaven, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Stepping Out. He is now documenting his vast knowledge of Tap in this new "Video Tap" Series.