I started dancing when I was ten years old. My uncle invited me to join a dance theater production. As a little child, I am willing to do anything just to have fun. So I did, and everyday I started to get more into it until it became my passion. From then on I loved to dance! In that production, the kind of dance style that is being taught to me was contemporary. Contemporary is a kind of dance style that makes use of the body's natural movement. When I reached high school, I became interested with hip-hop. One day, I met this group of people in the new subdivision that my family lived in. I became friends with them and they asked me if I am interested to join in their hip-hop group, I said, "yes". And so we practiced everyday except on Sundays. In the afternoon we go to a hill just 5 minutes away from the subdivision to practice acrobatics. We do all sorts of back flips and somersaults and just about everything we could think of that would feel good doing. Until after a few months we became interested with gymnastics. So we decided to join a gymnastics club in our city's sports center. The good thing about it is that it's free and all we have to do is learn it and compete by representing our city's name.
It was a great experience, then after a while we discovered that we could combine gymnastics with hip-hop! It became a really cool combination. It sort of had it's own identity. and so we danced everywhere, until we joined our first competition. A few months before that hip-hop competition, we spent 3-5 hours of non-stop rehearsals and we did it 4 times a week. It made us become very fit. On the day of the competition we were very nervous and at the same time very excited. There were 20 groups competing and every group was very good. But we lost in that competition, it was our first time to join a dance competition. We were sad but more of challenged and grateful. That experience made us want to dance more, and so from then on we joined more competitions and became known in our city, then we started to get offered to dance in promotional shows, productions and concerts. We became famous and had lots of managers chasing after us wanting to promote our hip-hop group. And so it went on for about 5 years. Everything was going great and we have made quite a lot of money with our dancing and we were sort of living in the lime light until at some point, my group mates started to become very comfortable with our situation and they became a bit laid back. We started to have less rehearsals and sometimes everyone in the group arrives late for practice. Soon I started to notice that we don't dance that well as we used to. And some of us become more interested with drinking alcohol rather that practicing. Until there came a point that we started to lose managers and invitations to dance and we started to run out of money as well. Then I started thinking about how to revive the group. I still want to dance so I have to look for other ways to keep my passion going.
Then i decided that i should look for other job or I could even teach dance. Slowly, I moved on. One day, my mum told me that I should try ballet because it can be a good career path and that there are very few male ballet dancers and they're in demand in ballet companies everywhere. Ballet is unique and is a great training if one wants to be really fit. The first thing that came out of my mouth was "ballet is only for girls and male dancers that do ballet are effeminate!" Mum and I had a short argument with that idea and finally she stopped convincing me. When I reached fourth year in high school, I was still dancing hip-hop until I graduated. When I was in college, I joined our school's dance troupe and dance organization that does cultural and theatrical productions. I also joined this group called "circulo de arte", a group of visual artists that does art exhibits as i also love to paint. One day our group went to a ballet school to study the dancers. We practiced sketching them as they are doing class. I looked and observed how they move and sketched them. I remembered my mum when she tried convincing me to do ballet. Then after the class I became friends with the ballet teacher, he used to be a professional dancer before. After a few weeks, I went out to the movies with my friends. When we arrived to the movies, we didn't know what to watch so we randomly chose to watch the movie called "Center stage." At first I thought that it's gonna be boring because it's about ballet and it might be a kind of a chick flick movie. My friends said that they think it might be a bit interesting as it's still a movie about dancing so we gave it a go after the discussion.
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