"I went to the first ballet class in judo pants"/ Franco-Albanian choreographer: I was laughed at in the neighborhood

2023-09-30 09:21:00, Lifestyle CNA

"I went to the first ballet class in judo pants"/ Franco-Albanian

Angjelin Preljocaj, Franco-Albanian dancer and choreographer

Angjelin Preljocaj, the internationally famous Franco-Albanian dancer and choreographer, was the next guest on Prime Minister Edi Rama's podcast.

The head of the government reminded him of one of the interviews that the choreographer has done before, where he said that he "took the path of dancing in his mother's womb, when his parents fled to the mountains".

Preljocaj once again affirmed this statement and declared that the departure of his parents from his hometown has made him more patriotic.

“Uh, it's true. It is also the idea that the path of exile is an almost artistic path, which gives us the opportunity to reflect on what exile is, what immigration is, all these issues that pervade our era and in a terrible way at this moment. But I will return to my personal issue, this has given me the opportunity to be a bit like two-headed, a bit like the Albanian eagle. A head that comes from my father, from Vermoshi, etc., and the other head that comes from France, who welcomed me, who welcomed my parents more precisely, and who made me who I am today, that is, a person passionate about art , after ballet and it is something that has built me ??and makes it possible for me today to exist differently, thanks to exile. So I am returning to exile again", he said.

The Franco-Albanian artist recounted his beginnings in ballet, when he didn't even have tights to dance in and wore judo pants.

"It's true that I did judo, when I went the first time I didn't have ballet tights. So I put on my judo pants and a white top, and that's how I did my first ballet lesson. And it was like a discovery because I really liked music, but on the other hand I was also very physical, I did judo, I liked contact with my partner, even though it was a combat sport, judo can also be very graceful. So these two things, movement and music, came together for the first time for me, and it was something I had not tried before. So it was something strange...", declared the choreographer, who revealed that his mother did not agree to take up ballet, while his father supported him in this journey.

Also, he said that when his father told the neighborhood where they lived that the boy wanted to be a dancer, the boys and girls laughed at him.

"I have always defended the idea that I want to dance, I must dance, I defended this idea in front of my father, in front of my mother, my mother was a bit indecisive, as you said, but she worked in the factory. And asked there: my son will become a dancer, what do you think? How does it look? And there she heard really terrible things, which made her also against it. So she also slipped into her father's camp. But there were also the boys and girls of the suburban neighborhood where I lived, because my parents were poor, we didn't live in a residential neighborhood, but in the poor suburbs. And there, of course, hip-pop did not exist, this urban dance, which is more masculine, more affirmed, which is also fashion, the era of hip-pop. And for the boys and girls in my neighborhood, dancing meant this guy wears tights and does some weird stuff. And they mocked me. So I had to fight and assert myself. I think the adversarial environment sometimes reinforces the desire even more. I think that if everyone agreed, maybe I would have done something else, maybe painting, music, I don't know. But I turned the opposition to the ballet and to me into a war, and this expressed a form of will, sharpened a form of resistance", emphasized Angjelin Preljocaj./CNA