Theresa Tucci was just two years old when she wore her first pair of roller skates. By age five, she was steady on her wheels and fell in love with the freedom she felt — her body moving across the rink’s smooth maple floors; grounding music beats pulsing through her skates.

“While I don’t remember specifically being two, I do remember being smaller than everybody, and I was a really good skater,” says the Calgary business owner and dancer.

Tucci’s mother was an avid roller skater and frequented Calgary’s popular roller rinks during the 1980s and ’90s, her young daughter in tow.

Hollywood Roller Gardens, Rollerland and the iconic Lloyd’s roller rink were spaces where Tucci (BA ’09, MGMT ’03, DESK ’00) found community, refuge and an important connection point with other kids from around the city.

“The rink was a safe space where I built confidence and found friendships,” Tucci explains. “I went every week. It was just happiness.”

That feeling helped lead Tucci to her business ventures today: Free Spirit Dance, a Calgary-based, adult-only dance studio, and House of Skate, a vibey roller rink in the city’s southeast.

“My own journey inspired me to create a studio where adults can use dance to explore a new side of themselves,” she says. “It’s never too late to begin again, and I’m the perfect example.”

In her twenties, Tucci discovered Cuban salsa dance while studying business management at SAIT and trying to find her way as a young adult.

“I was all over the place, and I was hard on myself because everybody seemed to know what they wanted to do with their lives, except me. Meanwhile, I had started taking dance classes,” she laughs. “All I wanted to do was dance.”

For several years, Tucci worked in the corporate world. Dance was her side gig: teaching, dancing professionally and travelling the world. That changed in 2015 when, at the age of 39, she “took a cliff dive” into entrepreneurship.

“I was miserable until I realized I’m an artist, through and through. I had to say ‘yes’ to that side of myself,” Tucci says. She left her job to open the Free Spirit studio and work full-time in dance, a leap of faith that also got Tucci back in her skates.

“The first five years of business were really difficult and pretty lonely — I needed to decompress. I had discovered a dance style out of Los Angeles called Roller Dance, where you skate on the spot like you’re at a club. I was like, ‘What hot witchcraft is this?’ And I began teaching myself something new again.”

Tucci met her House of Skate co-owner, Kathleen “Roxy” Janzen, through Janzen’s Nerd Roller Skates business. The two hit it off instantly, later working together to save the roller-skating community after Lloyd’s closed in 2018.

Last February, the duo marked one year since opening their 19,000-square-foot House of Skate roller rink.

“Everything behind what I do is movement, because I know it’s healing,” Tucci says. “I’m grateful to be giving back what it gave to me.”