In the summer of 2014, when five students from the Cuban National Ballet School participated in the “On Stage” performance at the Sarasota Opera House alongside peers from the Sarasota Cuban Ballet School (SCBS), it marked a breakthrough in Cuban/American relations. Not since before Fidel Castro took over the Caribbean island in 1959 had students from Cuba been permitted to visit or perform in the United States.

Just a few months prior, the founders of SCBS, Ariel Serrano and his wife Wilmian Hernandez—native Cubans and former dancers who defected to the U.S. in 1993—had taken their son Francisco, daughter Camilla, and a half a dozen students to participate in an international ballet workshop and competition in Havana. That was also an unprecedented visit, one that ended with Francisco—or “Panchi,” as friends and family call him—winning a gold medal.

At the time, Ariel envisioned an enduring collaboration that would not only perpetuate and spread the Cuban style—the bent leg held high in pirouettes, the facility with turns and balances, the soaring athletic leaps, the animal magnetism of the male dancers—but foster improved relations between the two countries. Changes in political leadership in both Cuba and the U.S. and the withdrawal of support for the government-run Cuban ballet system spelled the end of the international exchange in 2017. Ariel lost hope of it ever being renewed.

Fast forward 11 years, and on July 19, when the curtain rises at the Sarasota Opera House for “On Stage 2025,” Francisco, now a soloist with The Royal Ballet in London, will be a featured guest artist, along with his girlfriend and Royal Ballet colleague, Letitia Dias, and Isaac Mueller of Boston Ballet, a former SCBS student. A traditional ballet gala, the performance will include both classical excerpts and contemporary works and showcase students from the school’s summer intensive, who hail from multiple countries—but not from Cuba.

Which is why it is all the more important, Ariel says, that their school, which has built a reputation as the premiere school in American teaching the Cuban technique, continue its important work.

“It’s extremely important for us to keep a place that can still be called a Cuban-taught ballet,” he says. “We all have to keep as true as you can to how we learned it.

When Ariel opened SCBS in 2012, he had no idea where it would lead. The school operated on a shoestring budget for the first several years, its economic success hampered by its owners’ generosity in offering scholarships and housing to needy students, but Francisco, who had started ballet at the late age of 14, had enormous potential. Ariel's devotion to his son’s crash course in ballet kept him motivated.

Things took a dramatic turn in 2013, when Ariel took a group of students to the Atlanta regionals of the Youth America Grand Prix competition, the world’s largest ballet scholarship contest. SCBS was named “top school” at the competition, and Francisco ended up winning the Gran Prix—the top overall award of the entire event, male or female. Afterward, he was offered a scholarship to study at The Royal Ballet School in London.

Francisco moved to London in 2014; since then, his march up the Royal Ballet’s ladder has been steady, if not explosive. Now a soloist, he been given several featured roles, including at the end of last season, when he was chosen by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to partner a principal ballerina, Fume Kaneko, in the pas de deux from Wheeldon’s The Two of Us.

Most recently he was selected by Wheeldon for the lead male role in the choreographer’s Like Water for Chocolate, which debuts in October, alternating with esteemed Royal principal Marcelino Sambe. It is Francisco’s first lead role in a full-length ballet with The Royal, a privilege most often afforded only to principals.

“It’s an amazing break,” says Francisco, sitting in his parents' studio at the beginning of July, enjoying a few days of relaxation at home before he begins rehearsals for the “On Stage” performance.

“Sometimes I feel like I have imposter syndrome,” he says. “I feel like I live in two different places. I’ve grown to enjoy London, but this will always be home.”

Though it’s never easy for his parents to find the money for a trip to London—or the time to be absent from their own school, which now has a reputation that draws students from around the world—they will be in the audience for this auspicious moment in their son’s career.

But soon after, they’ll be back at SCBS' headquarters on Cattleman Road.

When Ariel is asked why he and his wife continue to work so hard, especially now that the son who was the impetus for creating his studio is now fully launched into his own career, he simply shrugs. “They keep coming…I am giving something that they give me [in Cuba]," he says. "I’m passing it on.”      

“On Stage 2025” is July 19, 2025, 6 p.m., at the Sarasota Opera House, 61 N. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota. Tickets are $36-$56 at www.sarasotaopera.org.