On Pointe: Boston Ballet Principal Dancer Lia Cirio

Lia Cirio’s parents say she came out of the womb dancing.

“I was always moving around,” she recalls. “I had the little tutu pajamas and all that stuff. But my core childhood memory is going to ‘The Nutcracker.’ All I wanted was to be Clara.”

Cirio is Clara. She’s also Princess Aurora from “The Sleeping Beauty,” Odette from “Swan Lake,” Nikiya from “La Bayadère,” and all the roles she has danced and portrayed over the course of 22 years as one of Boston Ballet’s principal dancers. On stage she soars, but today she’s herself, in gray workout gear, lounging in a chair in the Ballet’s long-established South End digs on Clarendon Street. She is a coiled spring of mental and physical self-discipline, hard on herself but full of praise for others—direct, sincere, and vulnerable.

She took tap, jazz, and ballet lessons from a tender age. One day a teacher requested a meeting with her mother to discuss her obvious talent. “I couldn’t hear what they were saying,” she remembers. “They looked so serious. I was like, what’s going on? Am I in trouble?”

Soon Cirio was training every day after school, a star in the making. By age 14, the next big step was Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, a proving ground for principal dancers around the world, run by the formidable Marcia Dale-Weary, a legend in the profession.

“She was very old-fashioned,” says Cirio. “We couldn’t wear a lot of makeup. We couldn’t wear our little necklaces. She didn’t like short skirts. You were discouraged from getting a tan. Looking back, perhaps it wasn’t the best mentally, but she trained me to work my tail off.”

Driven to Dance

The school was two hours away in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, so Cirio’s parents relocated and homeschooled the children. Their father, who worked in Philadelphia, saw them only on weekends. Cirio had a strict regimen. Schoolwork in the morning, then dancing all day, every day, from 2 to 8 p.m. She missed out on typical American high school rites of passage like the prom, but found camaraderie with her fellow dancers.

While Cirio was advancing through ballet’s forbidding ranks, her younger brother Jeffrey—another major talent—was pirouetting in her footsteps.

“He was a prodigy right away,” says Cirio. “I think I am kind of his inspiration for starting dance, but I sometimes feel like he surpassed me in the way that he has developed into the artist and technician he is today. I adore the way he dances—it’s incredible.”

Ciro’s youngest brother showed promise, too, but chose not to pursue it. “He likes to say he retired at twelve,” she says with a laugh. “He was the best of us all.”

Joining Boston Ballet

At 16, Ciro successfully auditioned for Boston Ballet, prompting another move for the whole family to Massachusetts, since she wasn’t old enough to live on her own as an adult. Seven years later, she was promoted to principal dancer, a meteoric rise for someone so young.

In 2009, she took some time off when her boyfriend at the time was shot, but not killed, outside her apartment. The crisis prompted her to explore new vistas, and she left ballet for contemporary dance, traveling and performing internationally for a year before returning to Boston Ballet and resuming her role. Her brother Jeffrey also became a dancer with the company but left for the American Ballet Theatre in 2015, then became a principal dancer at the English National Ballet. He returned to the Boston Ballet
in 2022.

Cirio has performed the lead role in more than 100 ballets. She has many classical favorites, but two stand out: Nakia from “La Bayadère,” which was Cirio’s first full-length classical ballet after being promoted to principal, and Aurora from “The Sleeping Beauty,” considered one of the most technically challenging roles in ballet. Act One’s Rose Adagio, in which Princess Aurora is wooed by her many suitors, requires the dancer to balance en pointe on one leg throughout the scene, while exuding the joy of a 16-year-old girl at the epicenter of her world.

“The first time I did that role, it was so daunting that I let the steps defeat me. I thought, I hate this role. But then the second time around, I feel like I conquered her in the best way possible, and now I can enjoy dancing Aurora. I’ve done that role three or four times now, and I love it,” she says.

“A lot of ballerinas just break down crying because you’re so drained from the emotions and how much hard work you put in for one or two shows. Even if it’s like a happy ballet, like “The Sleeping Beauty,” I’ve definitely cried during bows, because of an ‘I did it’ kind of thing.”

Ballet demands grace and poise, but also enormous physical strength, which requires a daily training regimen. There’s no room for slackers. Boston Ballet’s dancers are strongly encouraged to attend a daily 90-minute class at 9:45 a.m. Advances in nutrition and the science of physical fitness leave today’s athletes no room for error. Cirio cycles, does yoga, and works with the Ballet’s physical therapists to stay in Olympic shape.

Reaching for Perfection

“With classical ballet, you’re always striving to be perfect and you’re never going to get that,” she says. “And I love that challenge. But then with the modern contemporary things, you get to be you, yourself, and kind of break the boundaries of classical ballet and experience new things. And that’s really interesting and fun.”

In 2015, Cirio and her brother Jeffrey created the Cirio Collective, a collaboration with other dancers and artists. Since they’re free of any institutional restrictions, the group is an ideal place for experimentation and self-expression. Cirio Collective performs in Massachusetts, New York, and select spots around the globe.

In 2018, Boston Ballet’s Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen started the ChoreograpHER Initiative, with the goal of featuring the work of female choreographers. He encouraged Cirio to begin arranging her own pieces.

“I always thought I was happy just being the muse, but Mikko said, ‘just try it.’ And I did. A five-minute piece turned into a 10-minute piece. And I was hooked.”

Because it was composed during the pandemic, when dancers had to work alone or go to studios in small pods, Cirio titled her piece “Chaptered in Fragments.”

“After the pandemic, I had my work performed on the main stage for the first time,” she explains. “I created this piece in a span of two years, in chapters. And my cast and I, we just felt like we all had changed in that whole process as people and as dancers. I altered certain things in the piece to reflect those changes. It was really cool.”

Such a long tenure is remarkable for any dancer, and Cirio has much to reflect on. “I’m looking at the end of my career. Not quite yet, but it’s on the horizon,” she says quietly.

She still has one role that she aspires to, and that’s Juliet. Boston Ballet’s 2025 season included the iconic Prokofiev ballet based on Shakespeare’s tale of star-crossed lovers, but Cirio wasn’t cast.

“I have experienced a lot of heartbreak in my life, while I was growing into myself. And ‘Romeo and Juliet’ has always been my dream ballet. Juliet is the one role I’ve been reaching for that I might not get, and it’s really sad. But that happens in a lot of people’s careers, having disappointments. It’s how you grow from them that matters.”

Beyond dancing
Still passionately focused on her performances, Cirio is also enjoying training the next generation of dancers and expanding her role as a choreographer.

It’s not only dance she teaches. Ciro, who is half Filipino, remembers a time when the ideal look for ballerinas was pale, as white as snow. It’s different now, she says. She recently married another dancer in the company, and on her recent honeymoon in Mexico, she relaxed and picked up a bit of a tan. “I love being that dancer that young brown girls can look up to. Growing up, I didn’t really have that someone. I’m happy that I got to pave that path a little bit. And that’s where we need to stay—in a beautiful, colorful place.”