Sarasota Ballet revives 'Valsinhas' for its fourth program

For the average person, it takes an accident or an illness to learn how precious life is. For dancers and athletes, life’s fragility is always top of mind. They can usually only perform professionally for a decade or two at most, and an injury can end a career just as it’s getting started. To handle that vulnerability with grace requires not just physical strength, but emotional resilience. 

Sarasota Ballet principal dancer Ricardo Graziano has both of those attributes. Approaching his 40th birthday, he’s in fine form after tearing his Achilles tendon in 2023. He’s long been preparing for his next act by choreographing nearly a dozen ballets for the Sarasota Ballet. He’s staging one of them, “Valsinhas” (Portuguese for “Little Waltzes”), for the Ballet’s Program Four, “Notes Unspoken,”  on Jan. 30-Feb. 2.

On a lunch break during rehearsals, Graziano was feeling nostalgic as he recalled choreographing “Valsinhas,” set to 25 waltzes by Franz Schubert, each a minute or less that Graziano separates with a “breath.”

Although “Valsinhas” didn’t debut until May 2013, Graziano said he wanted to take time with the ballet, which was only the third he had choreographed at the time. As a result, he started rehearsing parts of “Valsinhas” as early as October 2012.

When he was given the assignment by Sarasota Ballet Director Iain Webb, Graziano was told there was a budget for live music but the venue (then, as now, FSU Center for the Performing Arts) wasn’t large enough to accommodate a full orchestra. 

“I chose the waltzes because they could be played with just a piano,” he says.

Photo by Frank Atura

When he was conceiving of “Valsinhas,” Graziano decided to create a ballet exclusively for men. “One of the reasons I came up with the idea of working only with men is because I’m a male dancer,” Graziano says with a laugh.

“The female dancers get to dance all the time because they have all this corps work and they have ballets like ‘Giselle’ and ‘Serenade.’ Sometimes the guys are barely there,” he says.

By using only five male dancers for the waltzes,  Graziano says he could give each a solo, duet and a trio, and most important, the chance to focus on their own performance without the worry involved in dancing with a partner.

However, even though “Valsinhas” was choreographed with an all-male cast and premiered with one, the Sarasota Ballet is changing it up this time around.

All-female casts add a twist to the plot

Only some of the five performances in Program Four will have an all-male cast. There will be all-female performances, as well. 

The public won’t be privy to the information in advance, Graziano says. “If you miss the all-male cast, you’ll have to come back for the next one,” he says, only half in jest because some balletomanes who attend Sarasota Ballet performances often come back the next day and watch the program a second time.

Both casts will wear minimalist costumes of velvet shorts and mesh tops that Graziano describes as a “biketard, not a leotard.”

Although Graziano agreed to add female dancers to “Valsinhas,” he didn’t change the contemporary dance choreography with the exception of one step.

A double tour en l’air (in the air) is being modified to a single rotation for women because it could be dangerous for them to perform, resulting in injury. “Men train their entire lives for the double tour, but some ladies aren’t ready for it, so they can do a single tour,” he says.

Unfortunately, injury is something Graziano is intimately familiar with. On Jan. 9, 2023, he tore his Achilles tendon and had surgery on Jan. 25. “I started physical therapy immediately. I had to learn how to walk again. That was the most interesting thing, realizing that you don’t know how to walk,” he says.

Photo by Frank Atura

He credits six months of semi-private lessons with Deirdre Miles-Berger, now Sarasota’s assistant director of education, with getting him back on stage.

Before joining the Sarasota Ballet in 2011, Graziano spent five years with the Tulsa Ballet, whose repertoire included contemporary works choreographed by Naccio Duato, who was influenced by Czech dancer and choreographer Jiri Kylian. 

“Every choreographer influences the next,” Graziano says. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but from having exposure to these works, it kind of got ingrained in me and my body.”

For a decade, Graziano was the resident choreographer of the Sarasota Ballet. He stepped away from that position in 2023, when choreographer Jessica Lang became artist-in-residence, a new role.

After that transition occurred, Sarasota Ballet honored the occasion with “Graziano Celebrated,” a January 2024 program that included three of his ballets — the abstract “Schubert Variations,” “Sonatina,” one of Graziano’s most classical works, and “In a State of Weightlessness,” his most critically acclaimed ballet.

At 39, Graziano is dancing nearly a decade after the age when he once thought he might retire. Does he have a new date in mind? “I live in the present and savor every moment,” he says.