CHAPTER 3

WORK, WORK, WORK

By the time I was six, dance had become such a big part of my life that I was taking part in ballroom competitions despite the fact that legally I was too young to enter them. It was against the rules in Denmark to compete if you were under eight years old. But even though I was only six, I refused to take no for an answer. When I wanted something, I wouldn’t let anything stand in my way. I live by the same motto today as then: ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way.’

I’d been dancing with my regular partner, Torben, since I was two and a half and he was now eight. I begged Mor to help me persuade our teacher to get us a special dispensation as Torben was eligible and needed me as his partner. We got it.

He and I continued competing together until I was nine. By then I had become so serious about dance that I wanted to train more and more and enter lots of competitions. Torben, though, didn’t want to make such a commitment, so Mor found me a new partner.

Kenneth was the son of a couple my parents knew, and the two of us worked so closely over the next few years that we became like brother and sister.

We both wanted to compete in the big championships and spent several hours practising at our dance school every night as well as competing most weekends. With Torben, dancing had been for the fun of performing; with Kenneth it was much more about reaching the finals – and winning. We were so keen that we even started lessons with an international coach from the UK who came to teach us in Denmark. It wasn’t long before we were excelling in the classic five ballroom and five Latin dances.

My favourite was the ballroom waltz, and because it’s the foundation of most of the other ballroom dances, it was the first one we had to master. It was also the hardest. Because it’s so slow, any mistakes show up easily, so Kenneth and I had to be perfectly in tune with each other to make sure we got it just right.

You lower yourself through the knees and rise onto your toes. The movement is very controlled, and unless you are in complete unison with your partner, it looks terrible, as if you are bobbing up and down like a yo-yo, completely out of sync. But once we’d got it right, it felt out of this world. Ask any dancer and they’ll tell you – the waltz can overwhelm you with emotion.

Every dance we learned was completely different from the others. The foxtrot made me feel as if I was gliding across the dance floor, while the tango is much more staccato. The Viennese waltz has just a few steps, repeated over and over again – right and left turns around the outside of the dance floor in a big anticlockwise circle and then the dizzying ‘Fleckeris’ in the middle. The quickstep, with its skipping, ‘chasséing’ and hopping across the floor, is very fast and hugely energetic.

Then there were the Latin dances. The exhilarating samba; the magical rumba – known as the dance of love, it made me feel like I was creating art with my arms; the cha cha cha, with its steps similar to the rumba’s but faster; the paso doble, which is based on a bullfight with the man as the matador and his partner as his cape; and the one that’s the fastest of them all, the jive. Danced mostly on the balls of the feet, with countless quick flicks and kicks. I had first fallen in love with it when Torben and I had competed in the jitterbug at our dance school.

It’s quite common in our sport to learn all ten competition dances when you start out, then decide to specialize in one of them when you come to know that that’s where your passion lies. I found it really hard to do this, but I always had a soft spot for the rumba. It was a dance you could practise over and over again and still know that there was no limit to how much better it could get. For me, the rumba described life with its ups and downs, love and loss: without it, I don’t think I could have carried on dancing as long as I did.

The year I turned 12, I spent a lot of time dreaming and wondering how it would feel to be the Danish Latin American Dance Champions. Kenneth and I had recently made the finals, but we hadn’t won. I promised myself that I would work as hard as I could so that I knew that whenever I competed I’d done everything in my power to win. When we were 15, we found ourselves the underdogs, up against previous champions. We won – and that taught me that the underdog can do it. That’s a lesson that has stayed with me to this day. Not just in competitions, but in all aspects of life – even if you are not the obvious choice, you can still win a competition or get the job of your dreams if you work for it and keep on believing in yourself.

The underdog can do it

I will never forget how exciting it was hearing our names being called as the winners. The audience’s applause made my heart dance with joy, and I ran onto the floor, hugging Kenneth and thinking, ‘So this is what it feels like to win.’

Blackpool beckons

As a child, when everything seemed possible, along with winning the Danish Championships, another of my dreams was to go to Blackpool in the north of England. It’s one of the most important places on the dance map, so you can imagine how excited I was when one of our coaches told us we were good enough to enter the Open British Junior Championships. Practically a world championship, they were held around Easter every year at the Tower Ballroom. I talked it through with my Mor and Far and told them how much I would love to go. They had a chat with Kenneth’s parents. I think they all thought that it would be much too expensive, but Mor, just like me, always believed that where there’s a will there’s a way (maybe I inherited it from her). She would always look at a seemingly impossible situation and work out how to make it happen.

For all of us to fly to the UK was out of the question: it was far too expensive. My parents had already spent a fortune on my private lessons, dresses and shoes. But they saw it as an investment and each of my successes made all the expense worthwhile. Mor would have seen giving up on going to Blackpool at the first hurdle as a waste of the money already spent, so she came up with the idea of us all driving there. We piled into the car, drove to Esbjerg and took a ferry to Harwich. It was a 19-hour crossing – but it made the trip doable.

The ballroom in Blackpool Tower was stunning with its gold ceiling and exquisite chandeliers. But most exciting of all, it had one of the best sprung floors in the world for a dancer to perform on. As soon as I stepped onto that floor for the first time, I knew I would be back. And I have been, not once but many times, and not just for competitions – 20 years later when Ian Waite, my current professional dance partner, and I were there with our sell-out show we found posters of ourselves all over town.

That first trip to Blackpool inspired me so much, and although the town itself took some getting used to I soon grew to love it for all the fun it offered and for all its flaws, too. When we drove into town on that first visit, it was the middle of the day and even that early the streets were full of drunken hen and stag parties drawn there by the town’s huge amusement park, which offers something for everyone. It was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a bit of a shock for a 12-year-old who had grown up in a quiet town in Jutland.

But our B&B, five minutes from the ballroom, was warm and welcoming, and even now when I’m in town, most recently in my first stage play, Calendar Girls, I still go back to the same road of B&Bs. I think it reminds me that dreams do come true.

Blackpool Tower Ballroom lit the fire in my belly that made me want to be the best I could possibly be and gave me the determination to come back as an adult and make it in the big championships.

It was also the place where I held hands with a boy for the first time. He was called Mark and it was he who, years later, introduced me to Brendan …

There were lots of amusements in the Tower where all the young dancers hung out, and although the other children spoke different languages, for the first time I felt that I really fitted in. I was surrounded by like-minded kids from all around the world, who had travelled hundreds, even thousands of miles to be there: kids who had decided to dedicate their lives to their hobby and passion, ballroom dancing. It felt so good to be one of them.

It was a tough competition. You have to enter all five dances, as usual, but in the Blackpool Juniors they have special one-dance events, as well. Kenneth and I went in for the Viennese waltz and were thrilled when we made the final.

There were many more annual Blackpool trips with my family. When I was 15, we added another yearly competition to our schedule: the International, in London. The heats were held in Brentwood and the finals in the Albert Hall, one of the city’s most iconic buildings.

We also went to Norway a couple of times a year, either for competitions or for coaching. Going on all these trips with Kenneth, his parents and my Mor and Far was such fun. There’s a Danish expression, ‘vi hygger os’. It sort of means having fun together, being cosy with each other. When the six of us were somewhere for a competition, ‘vi hyggede os’.

By this time, Kenneth and I were hooked, not just on dancing, or entering competitions. We liked winning.

Have you ever wondered why, when we grow up, we often stop wishing exciting things would happen to us. When we are children we find it so easy to dream and believe that our dreams will come true. When someone asks us what we would like to be when we grow up, we just come out and say it: firefighter, nurse, actor, and we’re 100 per cent sure that we’ll be a firefighter, nurse or actor. We don’t stop and say, ‘Hang on! How exactly am I going to do it?’ or, ‘How will I find the money for the education?’ or, ‘Where will I live?’ or think of any other practicalities. No! Everything is simple. As children we see a bike, we want the bike, we get the bike. Even if we don’t know how to ride the bike, we believe that it’s possible to ride the bike and we just keep trying until we can do it.

Later on in life, we become rather good at making assertive decisions not to do certain things. We create excuses, or ‘limited beliefs’ as I like to call them, to stop ourselves doing exactly what we want to do and probably what we are meant to do. The good news, though, is that since it’s ourselves who have created these obstacles in our lives, it’s ourselves who can undo them, too, and I have found tools that helped me to do this.

I think there is something very beautiful about the fact that when we were children, we honestly believe that anything is possible, and I think that holding on to some of that when we’re adults is vital for a happy and successful life. So, with that in mind, try this exercise …

• Note ten things you dream of doing whilst on this planet.

• Write down all the reasons why you haven’t done them yet, and take a good look at the reasons.

• Now throw away the list of why you didn’t do them. Those reasons are just limited beliefs that are holding you back and you don’t need them any more.

• Now we are going to reframe and plan for achievement. Write down the five of the ten things you dream of most, then for each of these five, write three steps you can take toward making it possible.

• Write down how it would make you feel once you have reached these dreams/goals.

How do you feel about your dreams? Excited? I hope so.

Just as important as goals that are realistic and achievable are the dreams that sometimes seem a little out there. I have had dreams that I have made a reality, but if you had asked me when I first thought of them, ‘But how will you do that?’ I would have told you that I had absolutely no idea … Yet I didn’t let that stop me from taking steps in the right direction, and believing that somehow it would happen. The important thing is not to let hurdles stand in your way – and certainly don’t be the one to put up those hurdles! A wise actor once said to me, ‘If I can’t find a way over something, I work out how to get around it.’

I think fondly of a friend who, in her 30s, quit a good steady career with the police to open a spa because she wanted a job that would use her spiritual talents. She didn’t listen to the people who thought she was mad to leave such a secure position and take such a gamble – and six years on her business is flourishing and, most importantly, she’s doing a job that she loves every day. Now you might be thinking, ‘Yes but she was in her 30s. What if I’m in my 50s or 60s …?’ Well even age doesn’t have to stand in our way. I always take inspiration from the author Louise Hay. She started publishing her own books when she was in her 50s, and ended up building an internationally acclaimed company publishing many successful authors.

Of course, big decisions like these must be taken mindfully. You may want to consider how your actions could impact on the people close to you, especially your partner should you have one. If you are the main earner in your family, for example, certain things might need to change for you to be able to switch direction, and it might be that what feels right to you is not what’s right for your partner. You may need to think outside the box to make these changes possible, for example sacrificing certain comforts – selling your car, renting out a room, or taking on a different, less satisfactory job but one with better hours that gives you more time to follow your dream.

Certain things might need to change for you to be able to switch direction

Sometimes when we make major changes we rattle the foundations of our lives – and this can cause relationships to flounder. So it’s really important to be open and honest with your partner, and yourself, about what it is that you want to achieve and why. Write down the pros and cons before starting out so that you are aware of the risks that you may be taking.