Archives for September 2015

September 22, 2015

What Did You Do This Summer?

Image via gfpeck on Flickr via Creative Commors

Image via gfpeck on Flickr via Creative Commors

It’s officially the last day of summer. A while back, I put out a crowdsourcing call on Facebook asking everyone what they did this past summer. Like I mentioned, while my summer was filled with lots of ballet (2-3 classes at least every week), as you probably noticed, there wasn’t much blogging.

Here’s what you said you did:

  • Many of you went on summer classes binges (like Louise who got a chance to try out the Sun King dance workshops — I’m so jealous!)
  • Some of you had off because of no classes offered, like Illene and Karen.
  • Others watched video classes like Celeste, who also couldn’t take classes during the summer.
  • Some of you took off, like Suzanne, because her body needed the rest (I took the first week of September off — the best thing I could’ve done!)
  • Others worked on putting together a ballet area at home to keep practicing at home.

Please share more about what you did in the summer in the comments — or share your own personal ballet story here — we want to read ’em!)

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September 22, 2015

Personal Stories: How Dancing Saved My Life

Editor’s note: This is our first user-submitted post! Want to submit your own? Check out here!

There is no easy way to start my personal ballet story.

My name is Lucia, I’m 24 years old, and I’ve never dance before in my life. A couple of years ago my father took of,f leaving me alone: my mother is really sick and she is under medical attention 24/7.

A lot of things had happen to me through the years and on 2014 I though life was over for me. I was alone, struggling with a lot of stuff, including cocaine addiction. It wasn’t until earlier this year that I found by coincidence a ballet video of an adult dancer that I considered to take classes. I was literally sinking, hopeless, sad, I was all in all: an addict. As my addiction grew my health was very bad. My nose started to bleed, I lost so much weight I look like a skeleton. I knew I needed a change but I couldn’t figure it out.

Days passed and that video was stuck my head and the song too! It wasn’t until then that I realized that may be if I picked something, a hobby or something else I could get better. I started ballet classes everyday for 2 hours. And I’ve been clean since the first day I started. I can’t believe I’m healthy, I’m happy and full of energy.

Ballet gave me the strength I needed. It gave me hope, it made me push myself harder it made me test my limits. I’ve never been happier in my entire life, ballet saved me. Ballet was the hand that saved me when I was drowning and nobody else was there. That’s my story.

I’m currently taking 12 ballet hours per week and looking forward for more. NOTHING is impossible if you try hard enough.

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September 21, 2015

How I Spent My Summer…

It’s been a really long while since I’ve posted a personal post — a really long time. I spent most of my time this summer dancing — including a performance at the end of July that went well and taking several classes a week since I had only been working two, part-time writing jobs (hence the limited amount of writing here — I found myself writing dozens of blog posts a week).

Now that summer is pretty much over (first day of fall is this Wednesday) — I’m planning on getting back into blogging, back into running profiles and working on getting the studio guide more complete!

I also spend the latter half of August (and the beginning of September) getting back into running. It made me forget how much I missed it and how useful all that cardio can be when it comes to long combinations in ballet). I might be starting a running blog to document the rest of my exercising goals as well…but I’ll share more about that later. Back to ballet.

How did you spend your summer? Dancing? Traveling? Share with me in the comments!

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