Diva Divo - Dance Magazine

When I first meet Gioia Bruno, it's right where she belongs: in the midst of dazzling lights, loud music, and a room full of wide-eyed excitement. Bruno, singer in the chart-topping and recently reunited dance-pop trio Expose, has just wrapped up a performance on the gaming floor of Mohegan Sun Resort & Casino. Sharing the stage after 16 years apart, Bruno, Jeanette Jurado and Ann Curless sounded better than they did when ‘80s hits like "Point of No Return," "Come Go With Me" and "Seasons Change" first made them a household name and a perennial pop favorite.

And ageism be damned; without leg warmers holding them back, they looked better, too.

Still dressed in her stage outfit, a slinky, black leather corset that shows off every inch of a fit and toned body (one that would give yogi Madonna a run for her considerable money), Gioia wraps her arms around me and plants a familiar kiss. Though we've already spoken by phone, her natural, vivacious energy – the kind that most of us require Red Bull and a cattle prod to attain – is just as infectious the second time around. A self-described "big mouthed, crazy nut freak," Gioia helped define the music of the Me Decade with Expose's Top 10 hits. But Bruno is anything but freakish; she's warm, familiar, and spirited. Since we're in a casino, I ask her to choose a random number; one that I should play on my next game of Roulette. She responds firmly and without a moment's hesitation.

"Thirteen!" she exclaims, looking up from an autograph as she signs for a fan. "That's the first number that comes to mind."

Few people would instinctively play the unluckiest number in a high stakes game of chance, but Gioia Bruno has a long history of placing her bets in the face of misfortune. Though she's currently riding high on the success of Expose's reunion tour, enjoying a solo career that has earned her a legion of club fans (her latest single, "Your Love is Taking Me Higher," arrived this month), and entertaining conversations about a possible judgeship on the American Idol bench, Bruno has also bounced back from major heartache through a story of Success, Struggle, and ultimately, Survivorship.

In 1990, in the midst of a World Tour with Expose, Gioia was diagnosed with a tumor on her vocal chords. Like a Lifetime movie by way of Behind the Music, she endured a performer's worst nightmare. The mysterious, inexplicable illness destroyed her ability to sing – and even speak - for more than three years.

"I remember exactly where I was," Gioia recalls of receiving her doctor's dreaded phone call. Though her management team was pressuring the starlet to continue performing, Bruno could sense that her voice – like a fading, strangled breath – was sadly and strangely slipping away. Though multiple medical opinions were unable to explain the root cause of the tumor's sudden appearance, Gioia's physician certainly understood the severity of the situation. "I was standing next to my bed, and my doctor called," says Bruno. "At the time, I was working with some dudes who were overworking the hell out of us [Expose]. We were making very little money at the time; we weren't making pop star money, and they were working us to the death. So my doctor had to stand up for me. He billed me as Disabled."

And for a moment, a pop star's world came crashing down. "I hung up the phone," she remembers. "I let out a squeal. And then I cried for three days straight."

For a singer at the top of her game, the diagnosis was a devastating blow. "I try not to think about it," Gioia tells me of that dark time. For just a moment, Bruno's effervescence dims. Her usually excitable voice, the type that could read a phonebook with the enthusiasm of a lottery winner, slows to a sad gait as she recalls how the reality of her disability slowly sunk in. "I was a mess. I didn't know what I was going to do… I was looking at my bank account. I was looking at my daughter, looking at me, saying, ‘Why is my mommy crying all the time?'"

"‘And why can't she talk to me?'"

But soon, Gioia summoned the eternal optimist inside. "I said to myself, ‘you're more than your voice,'" she says. "I said, ‘you're a smart person. You're a good person. You do the right thing, most of the time. Keep on doing that… and you'll be OK.'"

Despite the nearly complete loss of her voice, Gioia balked when doctor's offered surgery to remove the tumor. An operation, she knew, would permanently damage her vocal chords, forever destroy her ability to sing, and take away the one thing she still had: Hope. "It was benign, so it wasn't going to kill me," Gioia explains. "The doctors said, ‘If we don't remove it, you'll never sing. If we do remove it, you'll never sing.'" Caught between a rock and a hard place, Gioia placed her bets on the power of persistence. "Science is never 100% [accurate]," she says. "Say someone has pancreatic cancer; you can tell them that they're going to die in a few months. But someone with cancer can live 4 or 5 years with it."

Gioia stayed in the fight for the long haul, foregoing conventional medicine in favor of a holistic, natural approach. She took her health into her own hands: changing her diet, introducing vitamins, increasing her exercise, and taking up yoga and meditation. "I have my little concoctions of herbs and teas," she says. "It's not rocket science… Your body responds to what you do to it, and to what you put into it." Most importantly, she says, your body responds to what your mind believes. "If you believe it, it will happen," she explains. "So I believed in it [her recovery]. I visualized it. I visualized myself getting better. And it happened."

Indeed, it did. As suddenly as the tumor had appeared, it miraculously disappeared. And while Gioia had kept herself active in the music world, writing songs and co-founding a performing arts school near her Florida home, by the late ‘90s she had finally regained full control of her own voice. As a result, she regained control of her career.

"I put out a lot of songs in the dance market, because that's a market I was comfortable," says Gioia of her return to singing. And the dance market welcomed Gioia back with open arms. In 2001, her comeback single "Free to Be" became an underground anthem. In 2003, "From the Inside," landed on the soundtrack to Showtime's hit show Queer as Folk. In 2004, "Wreckin' My Nerves" showed up on the annual White Party album, and her first full-length solo album (cleverly titled Expose This) tracked on the Billboard Club charts.