Luca Lazylegs Patuelli

I’d like to tell you the story of Luca Lazylegs Patuelli, a Canadian b-boy who was born with arthrogryposis, a muscle disorder which affects his legs. He came to Armand Corbeil school on December 6^th and danced for all the students of Secondary 1 PEI and DIM.

When Luca was a child, he wasn’t interested in break dancing. He loved riding his skateboard with friends. Despite his condition, he became really good at skateboarding and used his hands to move forward on a board. After a leg surgery, Luca had to let his skateboarding dreams go. This was a very difficult time in his life, because skateboarding was like an escape from reality for him. Because he could no longer skateboard, his friends introduced him to break dancing. Then, his friends brought him to a breakdance competition in Washington where people made a huge circle and one dancer went in the middle to show his performance. That circle was called a cypher. Luca saw that and he wanted to go in the middle of the cypher but he had prostheses in his legs that prevented him from moving. That didn’t discourage him: he removed his prostheses, crawled in the middle of the circle and did his first breakdance dance. There were a lot of people watching him and they loved seeing him dance. That moment was the beginning of his breakdancing career. Since then Lucas has been breakdancing for 13 years! He became a world renowned dancer and accomplished a lot of things. He created a word: Ill-ability. Since Luca doesn’t like the word disability, instead of the prefix dis, he uses ill, which means cool in the hip-hop world. This way the word illability has a positive meaning: it represents something cool, awesome. Luca even created a team which unites break-dancers with disabilities from all across the world. They all have different disabilities and different dance styles and that is what makes them unique. The team is called Illabilties and they do tours across the globe. They even got the chance to share the scene with Katy Perry in Japan last October. Luca also took part in a popular Quebec dance show Revolution. He performed an emotional dance in front of 4 judges to prove that no matter what, you can always accomplish your goals. His favorite expression is No excuses, No limits. Unfortunately, he didn’t win Revolution, but his performance was inspiring for all the people that got the chance to see it.

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Apart from Revolution, Luca went to other shows, such as Elen DeGeneres Show, Canada Got Talent, Tout le monde en parle, etc. Lucas also visits schools to present his story and to share his motto: No excuses, No limits with the teens.

He wants us to know that nothing can stop us from accomplishing everything we want. He loved our school so much that he even recorded a personalized message for us: