Dalia Rawson shares her story of overcoming hardship that abruptly ended her dancing career, and eventually becoming the director of her own ballet company.

The executive and artistic director of the New Ballet in San Jose, California, reflects on a ballerina’s journey from battling cancer, to recovery, to innovation on EpochTV’s “Bay Area Innovators” program.

Rawson loved dance since she was young.

“My mother claims that she never felt me move when she was pregnant, until she went to the ballet and she sat in the theater, and that was the first time she felt me moving,” she said.

When she was about 10, she did ballet in her living room, choreographed pieces in her notebook, and invited all her friends for a sleepover to teach them too. She spent the rest of the year collecting costumes and making sets.

After graduating from high school in 1992, Rawson joined the San Jose Cleveland Ballet, where she studied under artistic director Dennis Nahat for 16 years. She performed many principal and soloist roles.

“One week, I’m dancing the lead in ‘The Nutcracker,’ and then the next week, my career is over,” she recalled.

In 2006, after performing “The Nutcracker,” she felt back pain and discovered she had stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with tumors in her spine that resulted in some fractures. Rawson spent over a year in chemotherapy and received a bone marrow transplant. After she spent a year recovering, she wondered what to do next.

“You know, my whole life had been about being a dancer. I started training at age 2, and it’s really my greatest love and my greatest passion. So I went back to teaching, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would as a dancer, but in my heart, I had always wanted to make ballets,” she said.

Rawson talked to her director, Nahat, and asked to choreograph a short ballet piece for the company. He suggested Rawson do something big, so she created her first ballet.

Eventually, she became a choreographer and director of Ballet San Jose, which went bankrupt in February 2016. However, her students had paid over $250,000 in tuition for classes that ran until August.

“So myself and my team committed to doing everything we could to make those classes happen for those families who had spent all that money. So I volunteered my time for about six months, and my entire team volunteered for a shorter period of time, and I dedicated myself to doing some fast fundraising,” said Rawson.

With support from local families, she founded New Ballet shortly after. Her company is structured differently in that it is rooted in classical tradition but built for the future, while maintaining dancers’ health, diversity, and the enduring power of live performance in a digital age.

“I believe we’re structured in a way that is sustainable and the right fit for San Jose,” she said.

Her school performed Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” recently, explaining how the iconic role of Odette/Odile is extremely difficult.

“Just from a pure strength and stamina standpoint, you know, she has multiple variations in pas de deux throughout the whole thing. On the artistic side, she has to portray two absolutely opposite characters,” she explained, adding that these are roles dancers dream to have. “They have one, maybe two chances to live that moment, to live that life of Odette/Odile on the stage for a very limited period of time.”

Rawson says she loves every aspect of being in the dance industry, from the administrative technical aspects, to creating sets, to staffing the theater, for them to come together to tell a story through dance and music. Her favorite part of a ballet production is when everything comes together like a puzzle.

“It’s a real moment of human connection amongst the artists,” she said. “And then when we go into the theater and we have the live orchestra, so live human beings creating this incredible score on the spot, and the audience, the audience is so important.”