William Orlowski
William Orlowski is an advocate of tap dancing as an art form; he is a hoofer, and proud of it. As a youngster, he fell in love with Fred Astaire movies and began tap lessons when he was ten at the Marise White School of Dance in Port Credit. He also studied jazz and ballet with Gladys Forrester. After graduating from high school in 1969, Orlowski moved to Toronto to pursue a career as a show dancer, continuing his tap training with Bob van Norman and Jack Lemen. He cut his teeth in amateur theatricals, finally breaking into television and the professional stage in 1972.Orlowski left musical theatre in 1977 to become a concert tap dancer. He was intrigued by specialty artists from the past such as Paul Draper, who had tap danced with elegance in concert halls, and who had pioneered tap as a narrative style. Orlowski opened the Hoofer's Club in Toronto as a tap school and co-founded, with Steve Dymond, the National Tap Dance Company, which became an international success.
His first major choreography, Brandenburg Concerto #3 (1977) impressed critics with its intricate counterpoint filigree, tapped by six dancers, over J.S. Bach's complex music; Dance in Canada's Spring 1978 issue commented, "Tap triumphed here, emerging as a versatile and legitimate art form". Orlowski also explored the possibilities of narrative tap as a medium for both expressing mood and emotion, and linking motivation and rhythm, in two full-length shows, The Tin Soldier (1979) and Oliver Button is a Sissy (1981). He experimented as well with combinations of tap and poetry, live percussion, and serious subject matter. In the early 1980's, concert tap masters including Americans Barbara Perry and Draper, and Canadian John Stanzel, gave works to the company. Orlowski's own full-length Hound of the Baskervilles (1987), a dramatic and humorous narrative work, was performed at Toronto's Premiere Dance Theatre. He left the company in 1990 to found William Orlowski Tap Dance Projects, creating concert works for dance series and symphony orchestras.
In 1987, Orlowski rediscovered his love of musicals, working with director Brian Macdonald on Dames at Sea, which earned him his first Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best Choreography. His second was for That Scatterbrain Booky, in 1991. He has also choreographed for the Shaw Festival, and for film and television. Orlowski has been mounting tap productions for schools since 1978, including writing his own short stories to serve as libretti, such as Jennifer's Dream (1984), about a young girl coping with the death of her grandfather. Another ongoing interest is creating performances for the Smile Company, a theatre group which tours hospitals and nursing homes. As part of his mandate to have tap taken more seriously, his choreographic focus is on creating more dramatic works.
By Paula Citron, Encyclopedia of Theatre Dance in Canada, 2000, Arts Inter-media Canada/Dance Collection Danse www.dcd.ca