Quiet please, there is a hip-hop dancer in the house … and he must not be disturbed.
Any false move, any lapse in concentration, and hours of painstaking work could be destroyed.
What’s that in his hand? It looks like a paintbrush. And is that a shoe he is staring at?
Enter the new, expanded, and still extremely funky world of Michael Ward.
Once it was all about fancy footwork, wowing crowds with high energy dancing. Now it is also about fancy footwear, hand-painting designs to shock and awe.
Once it was all about kicking up his heels on TV shows, music videos and the odd Hollywood movie, now it is also about being holed up for hours in a room at his Los Angeles home, glued to a shoe.
Barrhead-raised Ward has been stepping in a new direction, and true to form he has not put a foot wrong.
Check the website http://customswaves.blogspot.com for his company Swaves (based on a childhood nickname) and you will see why – there is an array of zany designs, from the Beatles’ Love logo, stars and stripes, the maple leaf, to cartoon characters and creations from a seemingly bottomless well of imagination.
As he describes it, his job is to take customers’ ideas for a “Holy Grail” shoe and transfer them to sneakers, pumps or whatever goes on their feet.
“Everything I do is one of a kind,” he says. “All my work is done with a little brush and painted freehand.”
So successful has his one-man cottage industry proved, that it has thrown up an interesting dilemma.
He is so overwhelmed by requests from around the world that he has to turn some of them down. Now at 28 he must decide how best to balance painting shoes with hip-hop dancing,
Should he be spending so much time peering at a shoe, when he could be breaking, locking and popping on dance floors, studios or workshops?
“It’s a tough choice and I don’t know really the answer,” he says.
Making it tougher is the fact that he doesn’t want to hire anyone without his obsession for detail. Unfortunately, that rules out most of humanity.
“I’m a perfectionist and I just don’t trust anybody else. Sometimes I go into the finest details. There are no shortcuts,” he says. “Also I don’t want to go into mass production. I would rather keep this one of a kind.”
Ward has been fascinated with art since his childhood at Barr-head Elementary School.
Animation, the world of Disney and graphic art have long gripped his imagination. But it was only in about 2006, while living in Vancouver, that his attention was drawn to shoe designs.
“A friend saw some of my work and suggested custom painted shoes might be something I could go into,” he recalls.
“I started looking online and ended up doing a lot of research until I finally decided to get tools and paints and paint my first shoe.”
It started as a hobby, but began to become more than that as word spread about his talent after he moved to Los Angeles, which he dubs the hip-hop capital of the world. Friends wanted their shoes brightened up, and then friends of friends.
Now he gets orders from as far afield as Japan, where there has been huge interest in his Beatles shoes.
Ward’s method usually involves roughing out a design in Photoshop and working with his customers until they agree on a design.
Then it can take from a week to two weeks, using special acrylic paints that bond to leather, to produce that “Holy Grail” shoe. Costs can vary between $150 and $500, depending on amount of detail.
While every design is unique, some are more outlandish than others.
“One of my customers wants the Mayan-Aztec calendar with robots and a terminator,” says Ward.
“Others prefer something really simple. They want a pair of black shoes with a white bold front.”
Ward aims to combine his love of art with the entertainment world. Teen-pop idol Justin Bieber could be an inspiration, although Michael Jackson is his current preoccupation.
He is working on some MJ designs, which he would like to sell at a Hollywood boutique.
Such ambition is a far cry from the aspirations of the teenager who left BCHS with a passion for dancing but without a clear idea of his future and went to Tokoro in Japan, teaching English and hip-hop classes four nights a week.
He taught what he had picked up from being part of Groove Street Productions and spending time at one of the top performing arts centres, the EDGE in Los Angeles.
On his return to Canada, he joined the Source Dance Company in Vancouver where he was able to refine his technique and learn some more moves in between stints at Starbucks and a clothing store.
While at the Source, Ward was cast as Bernardo in a modern rendition of “West Side Story,” before he packed up his possessions and headed for the bright lights of LA.
It was a brave move and for a time Ward was a “couch surfer,” crashing at friend’s houses as he continued training at the Edge and attending workshops. People started to recognize him and he was asked to be part of a demo reel for one of LA’s top choreographers.
He has also performed in TV shows, a Hollywood film called Kickin’ it Old Skool, starring Jamie Kennedy, and completed a music video that aired on the Disney Channel for the movie College Road Trip with Martin Lawrence and Raven-Symone.
Add to that a role in the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Ward can flaunt an impressive resume, one that should see him keep progressing as a dancer.
Yet with Swaves taking off, it is getting harder and harder for him to balance his interests. However he resolves this issue, Ward’s life will almost certainly remain as full of twists and turns as his dancing.
Before his next dance class, he must devote his considerable energies to satisfying another shoe customer.
So let us leave the hip-hop dancer – or is he more a custom shoe designer? – alone in his room.
For the next few hours this man of motion will be as still as a statue, hunched over a shoe, with a studied look of concentration.
Quiet please.
