Ethel Bruneau, known to many as the tap dancing queen of Montreal, has died.
Her granddaughter, Majiza Philip, confirmed the news to CBC on Monday evening. Bruneau was 87.
“I can’t believe she’s actually gone,” Philip told CBC Montreal’s Daybreak. “I’m sad but I’m also blessed because I was lucky enough to know her, be taught by her, be raised by her.”
Bruneau grew up in Harlem, a neighbourhood in New York City, where she learned to tap dance, but moved to Canada as a teenager.
She earned a reputation as a Montreal tap dancing icon in the 1950s while performing in the city’s clubs: Rockhead’s Paradise, the Aldo, the Black Bottom, the Cavendish Club, the Maroon and others.
Ethel Bruneau moved to Montreal from Harlem, New York in 1953, at a time when black tap dancers dominated the city’s lively nightclub scene. Nicknamed The Tap Queen, she was known for her skilled routines and was booked to perform every week.
She loved tap dancing, telling CBC in 2014 that it was a religion for her.
Philip, who is also a tap dancer, said Bruneau had an incredible strength of spirit and was a strict teacher who was able to transfer her passion for tap dancing to her students.
That energy and love for the genre are what captivated Tanya and Travis Knights as children. The two former students, now married, met in Bruneau’s class and later became professional tap dance teachers themselves.
“She would always scat the rhythms,” Tanya Knights recalled. “She made sure we knew the names of the steps to make sure she could tell us what to do rather than always show us what to do.”
It was an individualized approach to teaching, which Knights said allowed Bruneau to “pull out who you were in your tap shoes instead of making you fit a mould.”
Travis Knights remembers his teacher fondly as the “ultimate example of a life well lived.”
Once a shy 10-year-old who barely spoke to anyone outside his immediate family, he says Bruneau instilled in him a passion for dance that opened up his world.
“Her studio was unique in the sense that all were welcome,” he said. “The word tap dance means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but Ethel was always very clear about what it meant to her and where she comes from.”
Above all, Bruneau emphasized the need to “spread the gospel of tap” — a mission that Tanya Knights says is front of mind as she teaches the dance form to her daughters and their friends.
“Passing on Ethel’s steps gives me a lot of joy and a lot of meaning,” she said. “Doing that in a way that honours her — I think — moving forward will become even more of a profound experience.”
Bruneau closed her tap dance school in Dorval, Que., in 2019.
“She was a force,” Philip said. “She was a power. She was a lesson. She was truth. She was pain. She was everything. She came from nothing, and she worked her way so hard to everything she had, and she taught all of us to work hard.”
For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.
