Q: Who is Elena Travaini?

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My name is Elena Travaini, I am a 33 year old Italian woman, I am Aurora's mother and I am a wife, of my life and work partner Anthony Carollo. I am a professional dancer, a certified teacher of Caribbean dance and the creator, together with Anthony of a new teaching method called Blindly Dancing. I am a model, a speaker and contributor for magazines that deal with sport at 360 °. I am also affected by a severe visual impairment.

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I was born in Sondrio in 1986 and my life at only twenty days has changed completely as I was diagnosed with a very rare nonhereditary retinal tumor called bilateral retinoblastoma causing complete loss of sight in my left eye and almost complete in the right eye. Fortunately I was treated in the Netherlands with an experimental cure that avoided the enucleation of my eyes (I still have my eyes on!) but was unable to avoid the blockage of cartilage growth around them 'as a result of radiation therapy, chemotherapy and laser therapy. All this left me visibly disfigured obviously different and an easy target to unkindness and ignorance.

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Q: What is your definition of Authenticity?

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Authenticity is uniqueness: I don’t believe we are all the same, I think we are all different and that everyone is unique compared to anyone else. For decades people confused equality with evenness and the society imposed stereotypes to be alike in order to be accepted by the pairs.

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Q: How do you manage to maintain the value of authenticity with your company and how do you communicate it to your customers?

 

Blindly Dancing means literally dancing in the dark: it came from Anthony's desire to deeply understand “My world” he’s been in touch with for almost 10 years now! Blindly Dancing comes after a moment of my crisis during training for an important competition when dancing suddenly seemed to have abandoned me: I could not take steps that for most dancers were just basic.

 

Anthony offered to experience the dark by trying to dance blindfolded: he wanted to understand how it feels on the bodyl, he wanted to understand the difficulties and the management of space and time that I had to live constantly. With our biggest surprise discovered a new balance: in the dark we both experienced a deeper feeling in addition to technicality. I can say this was the spring that led us to create Blindly Dancing.

 

The first time we put the show on stage was at the Milan International Festival with about 5000 people who watched us in an almost surreal silence and then reached to us for a hug. That was when I understood what my mission was and replied to my life-long question “Why Me?” Blindly Dancing is an exceptional experience for both disabled people like me and able-bodied people like Anthon: it is our way to involve, inform and give courage through my story and the power of dance.

 

Q: You believed in your values and achieved incredible goals: can you tell us about it?

 

The "Blindly Dancing on tour" is one of the many projects that I had in mind and thanks to my determination, stubbornness and ambition came to life! We started from Holland (the country that saved my life) and we arrived in New York, in the schools, on cruise ships, at the TedEx and the Parliament building in Bucharest! I like remembering the interview given to Freeda which made over a million views; the experience of Dancing with the stars Italy in Rai, passing a casting with 20,000 dancers; having transformed our story into the short film "Blindly Dancing" broadcasted on all the big screens of the most important Film Festivals in the world; being guests at the Bolzano Passion Ice Gala: the ice skating gala broadcasted on Italia 1 and Mediaset Extra; becoming coaches of the Young Goose Academy, the Vigna figure skating academy that trains future Olympians that chose us to make the Italian ice skating federation experience dance in the dark. I also paraded for some fashion events breaking down every standard beauty barriers and I presented the Fashion Connection competition between emerging stylists.

 

Last but not least, we are carrying out many social projects: like teaching dance to children with motor disabilities and intellectual disabilities or fundraising for "Give a Color to a Child" specifically projected to support associations and the pediatric oncology departments with recreational and educational artistic material I am, myself, still cured at the Istituto dei Tumori in Milan and being mine a pediatric tumor I go to the pediatric cancer department: you cannot imagine how much a box of glitter markers can make a difference to a child and his family!

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