Yanis Marshall

Yanis Marshall is a French dancer, choreographer, and teacher who brought technically demanding heels choreography to international visibility through viral video, television, and performance work. Born in Grasse in southern France on 11 November 1989, Marshall trained in classical ballet and jazz before developing the commercial vocabulary for which he became known. His technical foundation is essential to understanding his work: the heels are not a novelty placed on untrained movement, but a demanding physical condition that changes balance, alignment, articulation, and how force travels through the leg and foot.

As a young performer, Marshall worked in French musical-theatre contexts and developed teaching and choreography across street jazz, lyrical jazz, and cabaret. Online video gave his work international reach. Closely synchronized combinations to pop songs—often danced with collaborators Arnaud Boursain and Mehdi Mamine—combined clean unison, wit, sensuality, and unapologetic gender expression. In 2014, Yanis Marshall, Arnaud and Mehdi appeared on *Britain's Got Talent*, advancing through the live rounds to the series final and making a male heels act visible to a mass television audience. The appearance amplified Marshall's existing online following and helped turn workshops and intensives into an international teaching circuit.

Marshall continued moving between teaching, television, commercial choreography, and performance. In 2018 he performed as the dancing Deadpool double in Céline Dion's "Ashes" music video for *Deadpool 2*. The casting relied on his ability to maintain detailed line, extensions, turns, floorwork, and comic character while wearing both high heels and a restrictive full-body costume. His television work has included a formal teaching role on TF1's revived *Star Academy* in 2022, where the broadcaster presented his heels specialty to a broad French audience.

Marshall's public visibility carries a cultural argument. His dancing uses glamour, humor, virtuosity, and direct sensuality to separate heels technique from a single gender prescription. At the same time, his own comments caution against erasing the queer and ballroom histories that precede him. His legacy is therefore best framed as popularization and distinctive authorship rather than invention.