'Sand in an Oyster,' A Dancer for the Disabled

Ballerina Rossana Penaloza spent six months in a wheelchair and wrote a play that has brought new attention to attitudes toward the disabled in Mexico. (Edgar Blancas - For The Washington Post)

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Peñaloza began shaping her project several years ago while giving dance lessons at a center for the disabled in Cuernavaca, a town south of Mexico City. But her own grain of sand, the one that eventually became "And You, What?," began forming years earlier, she said, when she was a child gymnast in her native Peru.

She regularly competed against children from a school for children who are deaf and mute. And the competition was tough. The children performed routines accompanied by music, she said, even though they couldn't hear. And they didn't miss a beat.

"I was so impressed," she recalled. "It had a big impact on me."

She carried those memories with her to Mexico, where she moved 4 1/2 years ago with her husband, a Mexico native who had been the conductor of the Lima Philharmonic. She was lonely at first. Despite her extensive résumé, she couldn't pierce the cliquey Mexican dance scene.

At the center for disabled children, though, she began to revive. The children, she said, taught her that "life isn't about 'me, me, me.' "

They made her want to dance.

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