Brooklyn, N.Y. - In between dance steps, Ted L. Levy offers words of wisdom about dance and about life to the dozen or so students in his tap dance class at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus.

Tap, tap, tap! "Listen to the rhythm." Tap, tap, tap! "Dance is a matter of balance." Tap, tap, tap! "Balance is the key to dance as it is to life." Tap, tap, tap! "Listen to what the dance is saying, to what life is saying."

There's a round of applause from the students as the 43-year-old dancer, director, performer and choreographer announces to the class that he is returning to teach again next semester.

No stranger to standing ovations, Levy is on a roll again after a life and career marked by high highs, among them, an award-winning career in Broadway's "Black and Blue" and "Jelly's Last Jam," and low lows that include a tough childhood, drug abuse and a suicide attempt. He is adding writer to his accomplishments as he works on a book in which he hopes to share his insights about the philosophies of tap as a guide through life.

"Just as in tap, the sole of one's shoe gets worn down over time and turns gray, making the foot more comfortable to dance upon," he says. "So too, time and the trials of life wear upon a person's soul, ultimately healing wounds and creating a stronger person. Hope is the message of my story."

Levy was born in Chicago, one of 14 children, his father a butcher and chauffeur and his mother a dancer in the chorus line of Club Delisa - "Chicago's Cotton Club." As a young child, his parents divorced and his mother remarried. Levy stayed with his mother until age nine, during which time the family was on welfare and he witnessed his stepfather physically abusing his mother. "I remember my mother's brutally beaten face hidden by sunglasses the last time I saw her," he recalls.

He was sent to live with his father, where life was little better - his father was a good provider for the family but he was an alcoholic. The one thing his father did that proved to be Levy's salvation was to enroll him in The Sammy Dyer School of the Theater and where he met Shirley Hall Bass, his first dance teacher. "From the first time, I put on those tap shoes, I fell for it," Levy says. "I had no idea at that time that a sound could be oh sooo good. Tap dancing gave me a place to run to…called rhythm."

It was at the school that he met Finis Henderson II, a master of tap and former manager of Sammy Davis, Jr., who took him under his wing. "He represented the man I wanted to be," says Levy. "He taught me the rudiments - what a tap dancer looked like, and sounded like, what a real man looked like and sounded like."

Levy left home at 16 to work in the Sammy Dyer School and at various jobs. "It was dance that gave me the strength to reach out for help, to leave home as a teenager and to make a life for myself," he says. At 20, he joined the Navy for four years, honing his dancing and performing skills while stationed in Hawaii. Upon completing his Navy service, he returned to Chicago where he won a local dance contest and his first professional theater gig.

As luck would have it, the producers of Broadway's "Black and Blue" saw him on TV and invited him to join their show. Artistically, his career was taking off. He collaborated with the late Gregory Hines on the hit Broadway show "Jelly's Last Jam," which earned him a Tony and Drama Desk nominations for choreography and he was awarded the 1993 Outer Critics Circle Award.

Dance critics recognized his exuberant and individual style, describing him as a "tapper of no mean accomplishment" and "slick and chic…terrific and even uplifting." One critic wrote, "Tappin' Ted jumps, turns, glides and slides faster than most people can tap their fingers."

Among his other credits were "Ted Levy and Friends," which included Gregory Hines, who directed the program, and Savion Glover and Jimmy Slyde. Levy earned his director's credit with New York Shakespeare Festival's "Doin' It In The Park" with Glover. He won an Emmy Award for his PBS special, "Precious Memories," and appeared in films, such as "Malcolm X"

All through the accolades, Levy felt something was wrong with him in his personal life and his inability to deal with personal relationships. "People rejected my personality but admired my art," he says. He started using cocaine, attempted suicide and almost overdosed. Eventually, he put himself in a hospital, where he finally discovered what it was that he had struggled with all his life - bipolar disorder.

He says tap saved him. "Dance represents the brighter hues that shade my soul. I realized everything in my life that was good was my dance," he says. "If it ain't good, it ain't God; and if it ain't God, it's gone."

Now, he is back on track with both his career and his personal life. This year, he won the Helen Hayes Award for outstanding supporting actor for "Hot Mikado" based on Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operetta, and he is in a committed long-term relationship. He is performing, writing his book and teaching. "I am teaching my students to listen, to take every challenge, to accept their choices, to become comfortable in their own shoes."

Long Island University opened its Brooklyn Campus in 1926, welcoming a diverse population at a time when other major universities enforced quota systems against racial and ethnic minorities. Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, the Campus is accessible to all major bus and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road.