This week’s profile Maria Lucia Violo, a 31 year old from Rome, Italy, who started ballet back in 2010.

When did you start doing ballet as an adult?

I started in 2010, when I was 28 years old.

Did you ever take lessons as a kid?

Yes, I’ve loved dance and ballet since my very first childhood (I used to improvise dances at home, to watch avidly every TV show about dance and even to dress up my dolls as ballerinas and made them “dance” as a play!), so I actually ended up taking lessons, which I did approximately since age 9 to 12; it was never a serious thing, however. I was living in a small town then, and we didn’t even have a proper classical training, it was more of a casual mix of modern dance and ballet. I didn’t like the classes very much, plus I didn’t enjoy them really (sadly, I felt very insecure of myself in those days). Even my family wasn’t very encouraging (sadly they believed the old doctors’ tale that “dance can do harm to the body”). So, the mix of all those causes made me eventually quit.

Why did you decide to take ballet as an adult?

It had to do with the beginning of kind of a “new life” for me. It happened when I had recently past my mid-twenties and I was reconsidering a few things about my life, making new choices and especially allowing myself to let my desires free without succumb to others’ opinions and decisions, like I had frequently done in the past. So it was kind of natural for me, I guess, to come back to my old love too (as I said before, I was very fond of dancing as a form of expression since my very first childhood). But it wasn’t easy: I knew I wanted to dance, but I didn’t know even where to start from. Italian society can be very conservative sometimes and adult ballet is not so popular here still, so I had to research quite a lot till I could finally find the right place to study and to feel myself at home.

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