Would you believe that Sammy Davis, Jr. taught me how to sing a ballad? 'You can be in an arena,' he said, 'and you should be able to hold their attention.'
When I'm playing live, I'll rip out a ballad from my album, and I'll play that solo on the piano, which feels really good because it kind of takes me back to when I was younger.
As a songwriter, I've got a lot of facets, so to speak. When you come to a live show, you get a better sense of that, because you'll see me performing a piano ballad and some acoustic songs and some not acoustic songs, all in the same set.
Everyone who knows me knows that I'm a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.
I found my voice singing pop and ballads, almost all of them Colombian artists. When I was 16, my family gave me a recording session with some Colombian producers, and that's where I started my career.
People call me for the ballads. Apparently that's where I've been pigeonholed. But it's really interesting and really fun. It's my favourite part of the job, writing.
The worst thing for me when I go to a concert is a whole bunch of ballads. You get bored.
A lot of my solo albums were produced by different people who had their idea of what songs I should do, and they had me doing a lot of ballads.
For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move.
Trump's presidency will fail. Just don't ask me how and when. It will collapse because at its center is a hollow man, lacking ballast, whose chaos cannot be contained.
Perseverance has always just been something that was in me. And it was a tool that came in very handy as a ballerina.
Fonteyn was our first proper British ballerina, and from the moment I started dancing, her image engulfed me. In my first year at the Royal Ballet School, Margot's statue was outside my dormitory. Like generations of budding ballet dancers before me, I used to touch her middle finger for luck.
Being the only African American at this level in American Ballet Theater, I feel like people are looking at me, and it's my responsibility for me to do whatever I can to provide these opportunities in communities to be able to educate them.
Being in ballet class, being on the stage, being surrounded by my peers at American Ballet Theater every day, keeps me so humble and grounded. Being in ballet class, I feel, is like this meditation for me every morning.
Ballet was so structured. I'd been craving something that could guide me.
Ballet found me, I guess you could say. I was discovered by a teacher in middle school. I always danced my whole life. I never had any training, never was exposed to seeing dance, but I always had something inside of me. I would love to choreograph and dance around.
My family didn't have very much money, so ballet wasn't even on my radar; I just found it randomly when I was 13 at a Boys & Girls Club. We were practicing in a basketball court in gym clothes with some old socks on. Even though it terrified me at first, I found that I really liked it.
Finding ballet gave me passion for the first time in my life. I was always very shy and just wanted to fit in; I never daydreamed about what I wanted to be when I grew up. But dancing gave me a connection to my personality that made me grow.
Ballet became this escape for me. I feel like I was on my own a lot. I was searching for stability, so I was going off on my own and imagining what I thought stability was. Ballet became a way for me to cope.
I've always been a figure skater and ballet dancer. I love physical comedy, and any chance that I get to do that... that is so me.
