Caution ? Wisdom ? Eloquence? Justice ? If Angelina Bruno had to choose one of the four virtues of the Tournon dome, she would choose wisdom. “That’s what I’m tending towards more and more,” she whispers, smiling. A virtue in his image. Behind her sparkling good humor, Angelina Bruno draws disarming wisdom from her personal story.
At 17, she almost died in a car accident, which left her arm amputated. After the shock, Angelina Bruno above all feels a feeling of relief, which contrasts with the look of her loved ones in her hospital room. Starting with the remarks of his mother who blurted out to him: “Who is going to want you arranged like that now? “, or the painful advice of a doctor: “you have to consider a different life.”
For her, the most important thing is what remains. “They saw me as disabled, I saw myself as a survivor,” says Angelina Bruno. The harshness of others' gazes does not disconcert her. “If I had to give advice to the little girl I was, I would tell her that her life is going to be incredible, that she must keep hope. Life can repair us later.”
Hip-hop for therapy
What fixes Angelina Bruno is hip-hop. Her face lights up when she talks about her love for this discipline, discovered at the age of 18, in the midst of losing her bearings. “Around me, all my friends were happy and talking about their future. I no longer knew how to sleep or open my pencil case. I had no space to release my pain,” she recalls. Hip hop offers it to him: “Something is happening in my body. It's an invigorating dance. At that moment I can release all the anger, in a roundabout way, without putting words to it. » In this art where “all bodies are welcome.
Opening of the Paralympic Games
As a dancer, her disability becomes a strength to stand out from able-bodied dancers. Like during the casting to join the tour of the rapper Black M. “A friend told me: You don't have something less, you have something more, so you'll catch the eye. It's an opportunity, make it a strength. At first, I hid my arm. After a while, I said to myself: he deserves to exist. »
In August 2024, his performance during the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, alongside singer Lucky Love, was praised. “I received a lot of messages from people touched by this moment,” she recalls. “A gesture is worth thousands of words,” says Angelina Bruno.
“The Paralympic Games have an impact and can change our view of disability,” she says. Before tempering his enthusiasm. “I have a problem with the term superhero and the injunction of having to surpass oneself to reach the same level as someone able-bodied. Yes I became a dancer but if my dream was to become a cashier, which has one and a half arms is not easy either, that should also be highlighted. »
