I have never been good at dancing because I have a directionality problem, and I cannot tell right from left, up from down, and so on. My limbs coordination is almost null. My mom used to call me “my wind mill”, because my arms and legs were long and thin and they spread in all directions.
When I was small, in school, I remember one year we had to practice classic dance and perform in front of our families in the festival at the end of the year. I was very worried because I was unable to learn by heart any of the steps and the arms positions. I was doing exactly the contrary of what was supposed to do. When everybody were taking a step to the right I invariably took my left. My arms were always in the opposite side of the others.
My only hope was to be relegated to the back row of dancers and copy what the girl in front of me was doing. But because I was then one of the shortest of the class, they put me in the front row, with my tutu skirt and my dancing slippers. Very cute, but absolutely ridicule because of my awful performance.
A few days before the festival I fell down and hit my head pretty hard against the corner of a metal door. I ended with several stitches and a bandage in my forehead that covered my left eye. Not very decorative for the ballet. The teacher then decided to situate me in the back row of dancers and I sighed in relief.
The day of the festival I was able to copy the movements of the girl in front of me and do the entire choreography without visible errors. I remember that my brother congratulated me and told me that he noticed that I knew the choreography by heart and not like the other girls who were looking each other to do it well. I said nothing, but I thought how blind is the true fraternal love.
Dancing