Each afternoon at 4 p.m., Olivia Turtoro, a sophomore at Lyme-Old Lyme High School, heads up to her bedroom, shuts the door, and logs onto the Zoom app on her iPad.

For the next 90 minutes or two hours, with only a barre and a piece of studio-quality dance floor, the 15-year-old Old Lyme resident, who began dancing at 4 and trains six days a week at Eastern Connecticut Ballet in East Lyme, bends in plies and demi-plies, and does pirouettes and leaps in an online Zoom session led by her ECB instructor.

“I’ve always wanted to be a professional ballet dancer, and I know I have to work very hard to get there,” said Turtoro, who counts New York City Ballet’s principal dancers Sara Mearns and Tiler Peck among her idols.

“Doing it at home has been an adjustment for sure, and I definitely miss being with everyone, but it’s worth it to maintain my strength and technique.”

Turtoro is one of several hundred ECB students who have been participating in live ballet classes in their own homes since dance schools and studios were ordered closed in mid-March, according to ECB Executive Director Lise Reardon.

The highly acclaimed studio, a nonprofit organization, has been providing dance training to students along the Shoreline and in eastern Connecticut since 1992.

“All of our students have been through a lot of disruption this spring, so the ballet classes are an important source of comfort and routine in their lives,” she said.

Reardon said the teaching faculty has found unexpected inspiration in the online classes.

“It’s one thing for these young people to come to the ballet school and see their friends and get excited about class, and a good part of their learning and their experiences is the friendships and connections and the excitement that they get from being together,” she said.

“These kids are now going into a room in their house, they’re all by themselves, the teacher is face-to-face with them through Zoom, and that takes a lot of courage.”

The teachers, she said, “are seeing these kids as incredibly resilient so that inspires them to come up with creative ways to inspire the students how to continue to progress even in a small space.”

In that regard, the Zoom setup has another benefit.

“It’s more personal because each little square is the student’s own and the teacher has to look at each student personally,” she said.

By any measure, the 98 percent participation rate shows that the “new normal has been wildly successful,” Reardon said.

And that’s crucial, it seems. Even missing a week of training has an impact on strength, technique, and precision that can take a while to get back.

“Dance is layered, skill upon skill upon skill, so you have to solidify certain skills in order to move forward,” she said. “If there’s a disruption or if your body isn’t strong enough to handle the material, then bad habits develop and you don’t make the progress that you should make.”

ECB training generally begins as early as 3 years old with twice-weekly classes, gradually increasing to six days a week.

As much as meaningful development requires “personal commitment and dedication,” Reardon said, “it also becomes a huge stress relief for them and a creative outlet.”

That seems to be the case with Turtoro, who described her teachers as “incredibly amazing.”

“Dance has always been an outlet for me and a stress reliever, so it’s been really good for me to still get to dance,” she said, as she prepared to make her way upstairs to her bedroom for another class.

For more information, visit easternctballet.org.