Dance was not love at first sight for me. I started when I was 7 years old and basically I wanted to stop at 7 and a half. But something happened at the end of this first year of school, an exam on stage at the Opera de Nice and I started to feel this will be something good...within the next year, dance woul be my life.

Becoming a ballerina will be my only dream and I worked really hard to pursue it..What did it mean at the time to be a ballerina? It meant dancing all the famous parts I wanted to dance, to be very thin, keep my hair long, walk a certain way and devote myself to the art form.There would be no eating cake for me, rollerblading or flirting with boys. Being a ballerina was the only goal, expectation - there was no other alternative.

At 16 my school sent me to the competition in Lausanne and I insisted to dance William Forsythe's "In the Middle" .I had idolised Sylvie Guillem dancing the work  with her red hair and short cut. In this part, I cut my hair and dyed it. Suddenly I looked a little different from the ballerina I expected to be at first. My dream was the same but my appearance changed slightly. I remembered a ballet mistress at the Paris Opera Ballet telling me how disrespectful I was because I had a bangs.

Throughout these years, I never called myself a ballerina. For me it always implied being blond and really skinny, with long straight hair falling on one side. I could only define myself as a dancer. A woman? Not really. A dancer.is someone who will be on a quest, a constant search for perfection, but a woman? I didn't even ask myself what it was...life revolved around dance and dance only.

Then, Vancouver came (Ballet BC 2003) and my love for music took me by surprise; so did this musician I saw who played at the Railway Club who stole my heart away. This heart had been beating for ballet all my life. Was it the same for him, me being a dancer who was interesting but not fascinating?  I was the ears who could tell him his music was beautiful...and suddenly something shifted. I was still a dancer of course, but not only that, I was a dancer who loved music and who was desperately in love...and it made me think...watching live music brought a level of happiness watching dance rarely reached. Was I getting away from being a ballerina or just shaping myself into a woman who is a ballerina ?

Sandrine Cassini - January 2004

Since being in Vancouver, my love for music and musicians have always been a great part or my life But so is dance. Dance saved me from depression, dance was my only refuge when my heart got broken, dance will always be running in my veins...but I no longer look like the ballerina I once thought I would become.

I now have tattoos and I want a new one, my hair is curly, sometimes short, and sometimes long, I fall in and out of love. I cannot function without music in my head...but my dedication for my work has never changed. Does accepting being a woman make me a better artist? I certainly do think so, but it took me decades to erase the voices of my teachers warning us once we started living we would lose focus. Maybe it's their fault if it took me so long to accept myself as a woman who is a dancer.

There are compromises in that there are two things I now understand.

Dance will be forever in my life and has shaped me the way I am but not only dance.

Life has happened and life as a ballerina who stopped being afraid of living is who I am now.

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There are two salient facts that Cassini did not mention above. She started dancing at the Paris Opera Ballet when she was 14 which explains my photograph of her imitating Degas's Little Ballerina Aged 14. The other is that she danced at for the Montecarlo Ballet and while there she was photographed twice by Helmut Newton.

The reason for Cassini's essay is that while staying recently at our house (10 days) I told her I wanted to take two portraits of her. In one she would have her hair down as a woman and in the second her hair up as the dancer. She objected to my idea saying that the woman and the dancer could not be separated.