‘You’re walking more upright since the last time I saw you’, director Nel Roos remarked. On my way to pay my very first ballet teacher Joke Bruins a surprise visit, I happened to bump into Madame Roos in the hallway of the Rotterdam Dance Academy. Proudly I answered I’d been accepted by Karel Poons of the Scapino Dance Academy in Amsterdam. ‘Well, then he probably sees more in you than I do', was het snide answer.

 

Audtioning for her Academy some months before she had rejected me. Whereupon my teacher, Joke Bruins, advised me to call Karel Poons.

Yes, I was welcome, Karel Poons told me in his dark baritone voice; tomorrow he and co-director Ine Rietstap would be tidying up last bits before the summer holidays and they both could audition me by myself.

The following day I skipped school and secretly sneaked off by train to Amsterdam, the city I dreamed since childhood to be living in one day.

 

The Scapino Academy was housed on the sixth floor, way up in the attic of the ATVA building in the Marnixstraat no. 266, a big lodging house for working class men, which already in 1967 had a significant share of immigrants of Moroccan, Turkish, Spanish or Italian descent.

The girls in the Academy were told to never look left or right, when climbing the many stairs and walking the long, hollow hallways, because

men could be found hanging in the doorway of their room hoping for a romantic interlude with one of these young, long-legged dance goddesses passing by, firmly clutching their little ballet suitcases. And also we young balletboys were at times ogled with keen interest.

 

Nothing of the sort however happened while I climbed the stairs to my solo audition on that for me momentous warm 1967 summer day.