Nora Curcio. Dancer, actress, bodyworker, teacher of yoga, dance and tai chi. Mentor. Desert guide.

My mother sent me to ballet when I was 7. She had been a ballerina herself when she was young. I am very grateful to her, because it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

At 13 I had to leave the John Cranko School because my thigh muscles were developing too strongly. So for a while I became a synchronised and competitive swimmer, and at 16 I started dancing again. 5 times a week. Every evening.

I had a dream. But I told no one. I wanted to become a dancer in New York, and I did not want anyone to talk me out of it. Back then my room was plastered with Alvin Ailey posters, and not a summer went by without me dancing to Frank Sinatra's “New York, New York” in the hotel.

During the day I trained as a sports teacher, in the evenings I kept dancing. Then I went to drama school for 1.5 years, until my acting teacher told me I had to decide: dance or acting. I said: acting I can do later, dancing now.

So I went to New York for 3 years, to Alvin Ailey and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. From the first day the city overwhelmed me. I had nothing in my head but dancing. Really nothing else. There was not a moment when I was not dancing, watching performances or sitting in the library. In every free minute I fetched books and studied anatomy. Why is a muscle trained this way and not another? Through this self-study I learned to correct precisely. That made me the teacher I am today. It sounds crazy, but I am that crazy. They were some of the most intense years of my life.

Later I danced in the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company in New York. There I learned the Asian art of movement, which I later deepened in my tai chi studies.

My parents paid for my school. Alongside it I waitressed and worked in bars. Not because I had to, but because it was always important to me to earn my own money.

Between the Sinai and Thailand, in 1993, I flew home for a short while. There I found an advert: a former farmhouse, a half-timbered house from 1660 in the countryside. A warm kitchen with a fireplace, a garden and a barn where paintings were exhibited. I knew at once: this is where I want to be on stage and teach people. My family bought the house.

When I came back from India, we moved in and straight away broke through the wall to the garage with a jackhammer. For a year, my husband at the time, friends and I converted the house into a theatre. On 11 November 1994, my 30th birthday, the Theatergalerie had its preview, and in 1995 its official opening.

Everything created there carried our own signature. Nothing was ever copied. My crew was like a circle of friends. My technician once said it was the best time of his life.

In 1996 my son Lorin was born. I took him everywhere, in his baby car seat to ballet class and to drama school. I have never sterilised a bottle in my life. My son grew up on breast milk in the theatre.

After 4 years of marriage our relationship crumbled, and we divorced in 2000. That same year my colleague Nina Oehlmann and I won the Baden-Württemberg Kleinkunstpreis with my choreography “Hallo”. From then on I ran the theatre together with Nina. Twice a week I taught dance, body awareness, meditation, yoga, improvisation and expression at a private drama school in Stuttgart. My strength lies above all in combining different dance styles, yoga and tai chi, and in my spontaneous intuition and clarity about what is right for the people in front of me at that moment. For many, I was also a mentor beyond that.

After tearing my cruciate ligament in 2009, I changed the theatre's focus and invited musicians. Ralf Illenberger came, Sandro Gulino, Bodo Schopf, Daniel Puente Encina, Momo Hafsi. Sandro once said to me: do you know, Nora, why we love coming to you so much? Because there is always this Sicilian hospitality with you. Spaghetti at the table, in the kitchen, by the fire, and then we go on stage.

Because it was such a joy, I did not notice how much it was all wearing me out. Until Covid came in 2020. Only then did I realise what a crazy whirlpool of just functioning I had been caught in. I could have opened again. But I knew I never wanted to go back. I already knew what I had done there. And I only live once.