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Jennie Rhodes
Friday, 23 May 2025, 17:16
A group of young international dance students from the Costa del Sol’s Capital International Performing Arts School, based in Marbella, took part in their first dance competition in Malaga at the end of April.
The students competed in the Malaga Open Dance Championship which took place on 27 April at the NH Málaga hotel and some came away with medals. “We had dancers as young as four compete and take home medals. They are so excited for the next one,” owner of the school, Lia Mullins, told SUR in English.
She is now preparing to take some of the students to the UK for competitions and training and the school is planning to take part in the Swedish Open in 2026.
Lia has been dancing since she was three and it runs in the family as her grandparents and parents were dancers and her parents ran a dance studio in their home city of Dublin. “I was born into it and grew up with dance being my life. From the age of 12 I flew to London every Friday after school to spend the weekend training and competing and would return to Ireland for school on Monday,” Lia explains.
Lia specialises in ballroom and Latin dancing but has trained in many different styles and went on to become British junior champion before moving to Italy to partner the Italian champion. “We competed all over the world and became British open champions, USA champions and ranked one of the top couples in the world,” she says.
After retiring from competitions, Lia, now 43, explains that she decided to focus her passion on for dancing on preparing the next generation of dancers to follow in her footsteps and “be the next champions”.
Lia has recently returned to Spain having first moved here in 2009. She stayed for seven years, then returned to Ireland in 2016 for personal reasons, before deciding to come back in 2024 to reopen her dance school. Having run a “a very large competitive school” in Ireland, Lia’s goal is to “bring the school here to the same level and size”.
Lia says that although there is travelling involved for the competitions and training, her long-term goal is “to develop the dance school here” so she has “no plans on leaving anytime soon. This is home.”
She explains that she fell in love with Spain having spent her childhood summers in the country and knew that this is where she wanted to live eventually.
The school offers classes for people of all ages including wedding couples, dinner dance parties and corporate events. “It’s a very international school; I’ve got students from Spain, Portugal, America, the UK, Ireland, Poland, Kuwait, Hungary, Ukraine....” the list goes on.
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