At first, the prospect of a professional dance career concerned his parents but their fears subsided when Huchard got his first paid job dancing for French music star Matt Pokora. “From that moment on, I got their full support.” Since then, he hasn’t looked back. No doubt of his career highs has been his collaboration with Madonna, with whom he travelled the globe for her ‘Madame X’ tour. It was a gig he almost missed out on when his initial audition proved unsuccessful. "I was confident. I thought I did everything right. So, it was really tough, but it taught me how to do things differently," Huchard confesses. When he eventually won the position, it was another learning curve. "There's always a message behind her choreography. It taught me that it's a privilege to be an artist. It gives you the opportunity to be heard, and you have to use it to educate people. When I work, I want to have a message. I want people to be inspired."

You feel this calling through the work he does with La Diva Pieds Nus (The Barefoot Divas), the all-women dance troupe he founded in 2018 committed to what the collective describe as ‘the social dance – crossing the lines between softness and power, between feminine and masculine, between continents and disciplines.’ [MEET LA DIVA PIEDS BELOW]. Yet when asked to describe his wider approach to dance and choreography, Huchard refuses to be pigeonholed. His practice compiles the myriad influences that have shaped his artistic vision. There is the energy of karate that he learnt as a child, but also batuka from Cape Verde, mbalax from Senegal and Congolese ndombolo. And although he loves Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and would have loved to work with Pina Bausch, he definitely considers himself a pop culture child. When I tell him that I see a sort of tribal influence in his work, he says, “If by that you mean, spontaneous, raw, and energetic, then yes. It really is a part of me.”