About the team
Meet the people behind the London Tap Jam
Junior Laniyan
Co-founder / host
Junior Laniyan is an accomplished actor/dancer. On screen he played The Photographer in Kill, Kill, Faster, Faster and Pvt Bell in 28 Days Later. He has also worked extensively in numerous television productions including A Respectable Trade, Doctors, Rough Diamonds, If You See God Tell Him, Prime Suspect 2 and Holby City for the BBC; Stealing Lives for Channel Four; Family Affairs for Channel Five as well as Twenty-Four Seven, Wavelength and Coronation Street for Granada Television.
On stage he played the role of Master Juba in Master Juba, Pete Spivy in Blues for Mr Charlie for the Tricycle Theatre, and Kamel in D’you Know What I Mean and Him in Fifteen Minutes Before, both at Nottingham’s Lakeside Arts Centre. As a dancer he appeared in New York on Tap and Cross Currents: Turned on Tap at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Robbie Williams Live at the Royal Albert Hall [video], Feet Fusion Tap Concert in Finland’s Gloria Theatre, Finding Synaesthesia at the Purcell Room, and Riverdance in Germany, China, Korea as well as in the UK.
In his efforts to share his love of the dance with others, Junior has taught numerous workshops in Greece, France, Finland, Italy and Estonia as well as the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, Colin’s Performing Arts School, Danceworks, Mountview, the New London Performing Arts Centre, London Studio Centre, Millenium Performing Arts and Sylvia Young Theatre School. He is also a faculty member of Pineapple Dance Studios London.
Melody Lander
Co-founder / event co-ordinator
As well as being a tap dancer, Melody is also a documentary producer/director, with over 10 years experience working in television on factual programming broadcast on BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4. The critically acclaimed Channel 4 series that Melody worked on as an assistant producer, Last Chance Kids, won a Royal Television Society award and was nominated for a Grierson Award.
From the age of eight, Melody initially learnt to tap dance through completing the traditional British ISTD syllabus. After a considerable break from the art form, in 2002 she discovered Junior Laniyan's rhythm tap classes at Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden, where she was introduced to the world of rhythm tap dancing and improvisation and hasn't looked back since.
She has been privileged enough to have taken classes with the likes of Heather Cornell, Roxane Butterfly and Jason Samuels Smith. Improvisation is where her passion lies.
Dan Sheridan
Co-founder / sound / website / publicity
Dan took up tap dance while dating a clog dancer, and has been hooked ever since. He has studied with many different teachers while moving round the country, and was introduced to improvisation at a workshop in Edinburgh with one of Junior's students. Since then, he's been privileged to study with Josh Hilberman, Heather Cornell and Max Pollak. He regularly attends the TapMotif festival in Greece, and in 2009 directed one of the student projects for performance in Athens.
Not just a tap dancer, Dan is a traditional sword dancer with Thrales Rapper, and also dances with Gog Magog Molly in Cambridge.
Dr Sheridan is employed as a computer scientist for Adelard, a safety consultancy working on behalf of the nuclear industry in the UK and abroad. He is also an LPIC-2 systems administrator specialising in Ubuntu Linux and VMware. He runs this site using Ubuntu and Plone, on hardware hosted by Hetzner.de.
Annette Walker
Renegade Stage
As well as leading the Renegade Stage, Annette is a member of the UK tap group AboutTime, and one of the key members of the Tap Rhythm Project.
Annette has performed in such events as Turned on Tap with tap group London Jazz Tap Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the gDA Cabaret at Greenwich Dance Agency, the royal charity show Aspects of Dance with AboutTime at Richmond Theatre, and a number of solo and guest appearances in festivals and special events. She has also appeared on television show The New Paul O'Grady Show with AboutTime.
In addition to performing, Annette is a tap dance teacher for Greenwich Dance Agency and a contributing writer for Talking Tap in the dance magazine Dance Expression.
