Anyone can dance for a hobby, believes 26-year-old dancer Mirabelle da Cruz. But if you’re in it professionally, you need to be thick-skinned to be able to withstand the tremendous pressure. “It’s not for the faint-hearted. You have to be sure of yourself and stick to your guns,” says Mirabelle, who had to struggle with a typical middle class Indian mentality that cannot imagine possibilities beyond the conventional. After training in Kuchipudi and following it up with Latin ballroom, hip hop, flamenco and belly dancing, she began teaching dance. Adults come for a few months till their work sucks them back into the recesses of computer screens, she says. “But kids are more enthusiastic. Because they are less inhibited, you can do more with them.” That became the raison d’être for her dance school, Dance-Kids. Since then there’s been no looking back for Mirabelle, whose clients comprise several celeb kids including Shah Rukh Khan’s children Aryan and Suhana. “With dance, there are no words, no stories and no lies. I feel the acute inability to express in words what I feel so intensely. Therefore, I dance!”