介绍:
Chelsie Hill has wanted to become a dancer ever since she was 3 years old, and not even a life-altering accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down was going to wreck her dream. She learned to use her wheelchair as part of her body and started to dance again. Today, she is a famous hip-hop dancer, motivational speaker and a fine example that when life gives you lemons, you can indeed make lemonade.
“Dance is the only thing my daughter has ever wanted to do,” Chelsie’s mother Wendy Hill said. She won her first competition at age 5 and kept turning in stellar performances all through her school years. She made the high-school varsity dance team as a freshman and everything seemed to a successful career as a professional dancer. However, then tragedy struck. After a party, Chelsie got in a car with a drunk driver who hit a tree head-on at 40 mph. She was diagnosed as a T10 paraplegic. The aspiring dancer retained full control of her upper body, but doctors told her that she would never walk again. She was just 17 at that time.
While most kids in her situation would break down and cry, Chelsie just told doctors, “Forget walking. I just want to dance.” Obviously, that didn’t seem possible, but during her long recovery process, Chelsie saw a video of a wheelchair-bound woman dance, and that gave her hope that she might fulfill her dream yet. The woman in the video was Auti Angel, who had been in a wheelchair for 20 years. Nine months after her accident, Chelsie met Auti Angel and the two instantly hit it off.
Auti Angel and three other wheelchair-bound dancers were scheduled to star in a reality show about their lives called “Push Girls”. After hearing Chelsie’s story, they thought she would make a great supporting character with her message to teens about drunk driving. Chelsie debuted on the show in July 2012 and that helped kick-start her own dancing career. While traveling the country on speaking engagements, Chelsie met a lot of women in wheelchairs who also wanted to dance. She started holding dance classes.
Since the accident, Chelsie has been focusing a lot on hip-hop dancing because it allows her to use her upper body to great effect, while still integrating her new legs in routines. Chelsie said, “Dance is dance whether you are walking or you are rolling, and that’s what I think is the beauty of dance. Dance doesn’t have a disability. Dance is something you feel in your heart.”
Despite having risen to Internet fame with her wheelchair dance routines, Chelsie hasn’t given up her hope of walking again. She refuses to give up and she is constantly in the gym working hard to regain control of her lower body.
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