I've always performed classical ballet so I've never been challenged like this. (African dance) is very different. In ballet we're always thinking about holding our arms out straight and being in an up position. You're more grounded with African movements - moving your arms very differently - it's all about being down in the earth.

Classic Ballet,

Keep away, keep building your creaky fairy castles, keep cloning clones and meaningless manners, hang on to your beanstalk ballerinas and their midget male shadows, run yourself out of business with your tons of froufrou and costly clattery toe shoes that ruin all chances for illusions of lightness, keep on crowding the minds of blind balletomanes who prefer dainty poses to the eloquent strength of momentum, who have forgotten or never known the manings of gesture, who would nod their noses to barefoot embargos ("so grab me" spelt backwards). Continue to repolish your stiff technique and to ignore a public that hungers for something other than a bag of tricks and the empty-headedness of surface patterns.

Just keep it up, keep imitating yourself, and, , go grow your own dance makers. Come on, don't keep trying to filter modern ones through your so-safe extablishment. We're to be seen undiluted, undistorted, not absorbed by your hollow world like blood into a sponge.

Yours truly,
A Different Leaf on Our Family Tree

When the doctors came in a little while later saying they thought they knew my diagnosis, I was afraid to know.

If ballet were easy, they'd call it football

He moved like a cat, a ballet dancer, but there was nothing homosexual about him...He could be dangerous when drunk... He liked to fight.

All you can do is be your best self. I'm representing more than just me. I think everyone should be like that.