Ruth Myles: Belgian actress dances her way to High Performance Rodeo

[Shana A]

Ruth Myles: Belgian actress dances her way to High Performance Rodeo

January 15, 2013. 4:11 pm • Section: Entertainment
Posted by: Ruth Myles

http://blogs.calgaryherald.com/2013/01/15/ruth-myles-belgian-actress-dances-her-way-to-high-performance-rodeo/

Being first is never easy. But for Vanessa Van Durme, there was really no choice.

A lifetime ago, Van Durme was a young actor, a man, living and working in Belgium. In 1975, she travelled to Morocco for gender-reassignment surgery, becoming the first transsexual in her home country. Forty-three years later, her monologue Look mummy, I'm dancing takes audiences along on her journey of transformation.

"It's more than my life story. It's a lot of things . . . For me, it's kind of a tribute to my parents," Van Durme says over the phone from Dijon, France, where she's performing her work. "When I wrote the play, I was thinking of them. I said to myself, 'What was it like for those lovely people – I'm from a working-class family — for them having a child like me in the '60s?'

"It was taboo. Nobody talked about it. Then they had a child that was rather special," she says, then adds with a laugh, "Very special! What did they say to each other? What didn't they say?"