Ethel Bruneau, known to many as the tap dancing queen of Montreal, has died.
Bruneau’s 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 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.
She closed her tap dancing 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.”
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