Last August Tania Vergara Pérez, who immigrated to Florida in 2014, returned to her native Camaguey, Cuba following the death of her younger brother, whose passing came just two years after the death of her only other sibling, an older brother.

As she sat on the street where her mother once lived, Vergara Pérez recorded the everyday sounds of the neighborhood, predominant among them the calls of the pregoneros (street vendors) selling their goods -- tamales, avocados, bread, medicines. Often creative, sometimes humorous, their musical chants were like a redundant refrain emphasizing the challenges of life in her beleaguered homeland.

“Their act is born of necessity, but many turn it into something more,” she says. “A daily act of resistance, transforming need into art and solitude into a collective echo.”

Those sensory memories became the catalyst for the choreographer’s latest work for Tania Vergara Dance-Theater, the contemporary ballet company she founded in Cuba as Endedans Contemporary Ballet more than two decades ago and revived three years ago in Sarasota. Part of The Ringling museum’s Micro-WIP (works-in-progress) program, “Echoes of my Barrio” will debut at the Historic Asolo Theater on May 8, one of three different pieces the nonprofit troupe will present at various locations between April and June.

While her work is not overtly political nor even always about Cuba, Vergara Pérez says her “creative perspective will always be rooted in my identity as a Cuban and in the understanding of the world that comes from being formed on that small island.”

“But at the same time,” she adds, “it speaks to something universal: The human ability to endure, adapt and find beauty in survival.”

In the beginning                                                                 

When Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, he declared baseball and ballet would become the country’s national pastimes.

To facilitate the latter, he developed a government-run network of schools fashioned after the Soviet model, where young students from around the island with the most potential were hand-selected and provided, free of charge, with a decade of ballet and academic training, as well as everything from books to ballet slippers. For families accustomed to hardship, scarcity and little pathway to a more prosperous future, having a child selected for the program was nothing short of manna from heaven.

Vergara Pérez was one of those children. At the age of 8, she began her training at the government school in Camaguey. When she graduated 10 years later,  rather than becoming an on-stage artist with the Ballet Nacionale de Cuba in Havana or the secondary company in Camaguey, she stayed to become a teacher at the school, where Ariel Serrano, founder of the Sarasota Cuban Ballet School, would soon also become a student.

“When I started ballet, the government gave everything to me,” says Vergara Pérez of her early years. “But behind the curtain, I grew up in a bubble. They wash your brain, they say you don’t find as good a school for studying ballet in the world. But I never knew what happened to other people.”

Vergara Pérez enjoyed teaching, but with her imaginative mind, theatrical bent and eye for the visually arresting, what she really loved was creating dances. In 2002 she founded her own company in Camaguey , Endedans Contemporary Ballet. (The name comes from a French ballet term, meaning “inward” or “to the inside,” commonly used to describe turns and other movements directed toward the supporting leg.)

Endedans quickly became a recognized presence within the lively Cuban dance scene, known for its distinctive melding of ballet, theater and contemporary movement. It was honored with many awards, including the Ibero-American Choreography Award granted by the General Society of Authors and Writers of Spain and the National Ballet of Cuba in 2008.

Though the drive for her choreography came from within, the government increasingly began to “suggest” that Vergara Pérez tailor her dancemaking to nationalistic, historic or political themes supportive of their messaging.

“They told me what kind of choreography I had to make,” she recalls. “When they have cultural or political things, they ask me to do something about this political or historical stuff. It was propaganda. But I didn’t realize it. I was taught to believe in everything.”

As achievement in Cuba’s ballet world was key to being allowed to travel outside the country, Vergara Pérez was subsequently allowed to take her company to perform in Mexico, Germany, Venezuela, Martinique and the Dominican Republic. Her choreography also appeared on stages from South Africa to Guyana, including at the Varna Festival in Bulgaria and the Tokyo World Ballet Festival in Japan.

Opening the door to the world outside Cuba, however, also opened Vergara Pérez’s eyes to what she had been shielded from.

“I start to discover the truth when I started to travel,” she says. “Within my small circle of artists, everyone was against Fidel and Communism. But I had my company and I couldn’t say anything against the government at all.”

When she created a piece involving large replicas of newspapers, that intimated her disapproval of the government’s use and restraint of the press, “I start to have some problems.”  

Increasingly, she and her husband, Guillermo Lopez Gonzalez, a painter and sculptor, spoke of the desire to move with their two children, Gabriella and Guillermo, then teenagers, away from Cuba’s repression. In 2014, Gonzalez won a visa lottery and the family moved to Sarasota, where Vergara Pérez reunited with Ariel Serrano and began teaching at his Sarasota Cuban Ballet School. Soon, she also joined the faculty at Sarasota Contemporary Dance, gaining an avid following with adult ballet students.

She did not remain idle choreographically — that, in fact, would be impossible.

“I always choregraph,” Vergara Pérez says, whose first pieces in the U.S. were created for students at the Sarasota Cuban school. “I can’t stop. Wherever I go, I’ll find a place. It might be a place with old people and the piece might be sitting on a chair and just using arms, but I can’t stop. I tried some time ago, but I can’t. You find a place.”

She also choreographed for multiple professional companies, including the Milwaukee Ballet, Kentucky Ballet, Dimensions Theatre of Miami, and the National Ballet Company of Costa Rica, as well as for a Sarasota Opera production.

“But when I go there, I have to do it very fast,” Vergara Pérez says, a perfectionist whose work evolves over rehearsals. “I need more time to make a mature piece. I needed more time to make it better. Eventually I said, I don’t want to do it this way anymore.”

That was in 2021, about the same time Vergara Pérez gained her U.S. citizenship. When a half dozen women from her class at SCD began encouraging her to revive the company she started in Cuba so long ago – and promised to make it a reality by helping with publicity and fundraising – she saw it as a way to do her choreography, for the first time, without restriction.

“Freedom!” she says, when asked why she would embark on the difficult challenge of sustaining a new company at this point in her career. “For a creator working in live performance – whose connection with the audience happens in physical space – the development of a piece can extend far beyond its premiere. Knowing that you have the time to let a new creation mature is a luxury every artist longs for.”

A company rebirth                                                  

The revived company premiered its first work – “Voices That Move Me,” inspired by women writers from throughout the world – in early 2023, followed by “Occupational Therapy,” a comedy, set to Mozart, later that year. That was enough to get the troupe named “Best New Dance Company of 2023” by Sarasota Magazine.

Three more works premiered in 2024 and last year, another three, including “Casa Havana,” a work-in-progress that was voted the “audience favorite” at the 2025 Squeaky Wheel Fringe Festival and that will be expanded to a full-length production for two shows at the Cook Theater in the FSU Center for Performing Arts in June. In 2025, the company was rechristened Tania Vergara Dance-Theater, to better showcase the choreographer’s leadership as well as its emphasis on collaborative works combining classical technique, theatrical storytelling and contemporary themes.

All of this has been accomplished without a dedicated studio space or any full-time dancers. (All of her dancers are what’s known as “project” artists, contracted and paid for by the individual project.) Vergara Pérez rents floor space for rehearsals at the various studios where she teaches and has developed an uncanny ability to ferret out gifted dancers who, for one reason or another, have not already been retained by other companies or choreographers.

The three dancers rehearsing recently for “Echoes of my Barrio” are evidence of her unerring eye for talent.

Anais Arreola-Pilarte is a California native with a B.A. in dance whose career options were curtailed by her graduation during the Covid pandemic. Of necessity she took a full-time non-dance job after moving to Florida with her boyfriend. However, when, “on a whim,” she took a class at SCD and  the choreographer asked her, “Do you dance anywhere?” she was thrilled to embark on “the biggest push I’ve done dance-wise in five years.”

“I said, ‘Absolutely, I’ll do anything!” says Arreola-Pilarte. “I was happy just to be included. She put a lot of trust in me, which was crazy, and I’m really grateful for that.”

Likewise, Isabella Serrano was a “ballet baby” from Ocala who trained at Orlando Ballet, Colorado Ballet and elsewhere, but lost her “spark” for ballet after a year and a half as a trainee at The Sarasota Ballet. After taking a job at a high-end retail clothing store, she began dabbling in contemporary classes at SCD that expanded her artistry and performing sporadically – including at the Squeaky Wheel festival, where Vergara Pérez saw her a year ago and snatched her up.

“When I find someone like that, who has talent but is also so committed, passionate and serious about the work, I want to work with those people all the time,” Vergara Pérez says. “She’s studied everywhere and she has so many tools. Sometimes talent is not enough, you need people that answer you in every way.”

It was Serrano who brought her boyfriend, Aidan Bjorklund, a graduate of The Sarasota Ballet’s Dance-Next Generation program as well as its Margaret Barbieri Conservatory, to Vergara Pérez’s attention. For largely financial reasons, he’d left the ballet arena to take a job as a ballroom instructor at an Arthur Murray franchise and to pursue an associate’s degree in theater at State College of Florida.

But with Serrano’s encouragement, he submitted a video after Vergara Pérez lost another male dancer she’d been planning to use in “Echoes of my Barrio.” Initially, the choreographer didn’t think he was “a good match,” but she’s since learned her first impression was in error. And Bjorkland, who’d lost his lust for ballet, has gained an appreciation for new ways of using his talents.

“I love how interesting her choreography is,” Bjorkland says. “It’s unconventional but in a very organic way. I have never thought to move that way, but it intrigues me a lot. I feel like I’m being pushed as a professional and that this is a very integral part of my dance career.”

A final dream

Now that she has the dancers, the freedom to explore her vision and the assistance to help promote the company and her work, all she is lacking – besides badly-needed funding, of course – is a place to call her own, Vergara Pérez says.

“If I have a place, a room, a studio, I can have more time with my dancers,” she says. “This is my dream; to have a place where I can work more seriously.”

A place where she can create work “that is memorable – performances with which audiences can genuinely connect.”

Sometimes that work will inevitably be about Cuba, a place where she can still find some hope, if not in the government, then in the people.

“In Cuba, what we are witnessing is not just political stagnation, but the sustained suffering of a people whose basic rights and opportunities are constantly violated,” she says. “At the same time, Cubans around the world have become more active and vocal than ever.

“So while I don’t have much hope in the system itself, I do believe in the collective voice of Cubans – both on the island and in the diaspora – who are demanding truth, dignity and real change.”

As for her own work, her only goal is that her audiences “feel something.”

“If my work can move someone – emotionally, intellectually, even physically – then it has already made an impact. But beyond that, I hope it fosters reflection, empathy and a deeper awareness of the human experience.                                                                              

Upcoming Tania Vergara Dance-Theater performances:

“HuMangrove,” a celebration of the mangrove root – resilient, intertwined and essential for sustaining life along the shore – featuring contemporary dance, music and poetry by Florida conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas and projections of the mangrove paintings of Guillermo Lopez Gonzalez. 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. April 25 at Sarasota Contemporary Dance, 1400 Boulevard of the Arts, Suite 300. Tickets at https://sarasotacontemporarydance.org/in-studio

“Echoes of My Barrio,” part of The Ringling MicroWOP (works-in-progress) program, which uses recordings of street vendors in Cuba and fragments of Cuban music to “create a landscape where survival becomes rhythm and necessity becomes dance.” 7:30 p.m. May 8 at the Historic Asolo Theater, 5401 Bay Shore Drive. Tickets at https://www.ringling.org/event/microwip-thehat-2

“Casa Havana,” the full-length version of the work that won the “audience favorite” award at the 2025 Squeaky Wheel Fringe Festival. 7 p.m. June 3 and 2:30 p.m. June 8 at the Cook Theater, FSU Center for the Performing Arts, 7777 N. Tamiami Trail. Tickets at https://www.squeakywheeltheatre.org/fringe