Rhythm becomes story. Movement becomes memory. Travis Knights creates performances, films, and cultural experiences rooted in tap dance and jazz improvisation.
Photo: Christina De Melo“an electrifying tap-dance tour de force”
Live performance, documentary film, and interdisciplinary creation that place tap dance in conversation with music, memory, identity, and imagined futures.
Planning a programme? Go to presenter resources →
Jazz you can see. Rhythm you can feel. An improvised conversation between tap dancer, live ensemble, storytelling, and audience.
Interdisciplinary creationTap dance and jazz culture imagine a new humanity—and ask which histories follow us when we leave Earth.
A Tap Love Tour production · Premiered at Fall for Dance North (2024). Presented by Danse Danse at Place des Arts, Montréal (2025).
Production photo: Kendra Epik · 2024
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A dancing body becomes a living archive of knowledge, resistance, and impermanence.
Production & development: Anandam.
Direction, dramaturgy & co-choreography: Brandy Leary.
Performance, composition & co-choreography: Travis Knights.
Live première: MAI, Montréal (May 2022). Installation presented at Theatre Passe Muraille (2021).
Photo: Eamon MacMahon · Courtesy of Anandam
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Tap and trumpet in conversation. Jazz is Dead brings Travis together with visionary jazz composer and trumpeter Theo Croker for an intimate duet.
A collaboration spearheaded by dance Immersion in association with Luminato Festival.
Discuss a new collaboration →What do we carry with us when we leave Earth? What could we become together?
Tap dance, live music, and an imagined Martian world bring a group of travellers face to face with belonging, difference, and the possibility of building community.
Travis and his collaborators are entering a new creative process to deepen the story, expand the music, and explore the relationships at the heart of The Mars Project.
Rooted in tap’s African American lineage and the spirit of jazz improvisation, the work asks how imagining life on another planet might help us recognise our shared humanity here.
A Tap Love Tour production. Premiered at Fall for Dance North in 2024; presented by Danse Danse at Place des Arts, Montréal, in 2025.
Interested in what comes next? Get in touch to request news of future performances and opportunities to encounter the work as it develops.
Request Mars updatesOpens an email draft to Travis.
Start a conversation about future presentation, a development residency, or a creative partnership. Request the 2024 trailer, a full-length screener, and a conversation about the production’s next phase.
Enquire / request a screenerOpens an email draft to Travis.
Born in Montréal and based in Brampton, Ontario, Travis entered the tap dance tradition through his teacher and lifelong mentor, Harlem-born Ethel Bruneau. She offered more than steps: a way of understanding rhythm as memory, community, and cultural inheritance.
Since beginning his professional career in 2000, Travis’s work has travelled across stages, classrooms, festivals, and communities on four continents. He creates experiences that honour tap dance as a living Black cultural practice while inviting audiences into improvisation, dialogue, and possibility.
In partnership with dance Immersion, Travis and Lisa La Touche co-created and co-directed the Legacy Series: Tap Dance Symposium (2021), reconnecting Toronto’s Black community with tap’s cultural roots. In 2025, he performed Jazz is Dead with trumpeter Theo Croker, a collaboration spearheaded by dance Immersion in association with Luminato Festival.
Soulpepper’s The Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience, presented by David & Hannah Mirvish at Toronto’s CAA Theatre (2026).
“an electrifying tap-dance tour de force”
“tap-dancer extraordinaire”
Travis works across performance, film, education, and cultural convening—each form offering a different way to listen.
A feature documentary exploring healing, identity, and the restorative power of cultural knowledge. Screenings create space for audiences to listen, reflect, and continue the conversation together.
Directed by Travis Knights · A Tap Love Tour production.
Bring the film to your communityTap dance, jazz improvisation, cultural history, artist talks, and community engagement for studios, schools, festivals, and organizations.
Invite Travis →A not-for-profit organization advancing tap dance through performance, preservation, education, film, and international exchange.
Visit Tap Love Tour →Tap is an oral tradition. Its history lives in the stories, relationships, and knowledge that artists pass from one generation to the next.
Hosted by Travis Knights, these conversations give dancers and culture bearers room to speak in their own voices. Listen to the people shaping the form, learn from their experiences, and discover the lives behind the steps.
Explore a performance, host a screening, or develop an exchange with your community. Start with the overview, then get in touch about the work that fits your programme.
Ask for press photographs, technical information, or Mars viewing materials. Include the project, your organisation, dates and location so we can discuss the right fit.
Request presenter materialsOpens an email draft. Touring details and availability are confirmed through conversation.
For performances, screenings, workshops, residencies, speaking engagements, commissions, and creative collaborations.
Email: t.knights@gmail.com