Eli Lucchesi has been offered a scholarship to Davis & Elkins College, a liberal arts college in Elkins, West Virginia! He will be attending the first program of its kind in the United States; a dance curriculum exploring social and vernacular forms such as Appalachian flatfooting, tap, swing, hip-hop and other urban dance, as well as classic forms such as ballet. We wish Eli the best of luck in this fun and exciting endeavor!
More about Eli... Eli Lucchesi graduated from Alma High School in 2010. He first started dancing at the Academy of Performing Arts when he was eight years old, studying boys jazz, hip hop and tap on and off throughout his education, and started to focus on tap with Kathy Francis while in high school. He had the opportunity to study clogging and tap with Nic Gareiss for two years. He enjoys improvisational tapping and has lead tap improv warm-ups for advanced tap classes. In the summer of 2013, he attended the Augusta old time fiddle and dance camp at Davis and Elkins college, in Elkins WV. In that same summer he want to Ashokan southern fiddle and dance camp in up state NY. At both of these camps he studied percussive dance with a focus on clogging and flat footing under the instruction of some of the countries best percussive dancers, including Nic. More recently he has begun getting involved in the local Michigan swing dancing community, with regular attendance at the Alma college swing club and other swing events as far away as Ann Arbor. He continues to participates in workshops in tap, clogging, swing and traditional dance whenever he can.
Eli is an accomplished percussionist, performing in marching, concert and jazz band throughout school, earning top ratings at State competitions for percussion ensemble and drum-line all four years and attended the Horner Percussion Institute at Alma College. He believes that tap dance is the fusion of rhythm and movement; you need to be a musician to understand the rhythm and a dancer to express it in your feet. He is a certified welder, and certified barista, as of Jan 17th 2013. He has won competitions with juggle sticks and is skilled with yo-yos, and does a mean robot!