Diversions 8.7.14

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Dancers get serious about their careers PAGE 2

THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2014

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FOOD | BUSINESS IS COOKING

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by Mallory Gnaegy | A&E Editor

Mallory Gnaegy

Kristine Insalaco-Gaioni hand chops organic chocolate, which she adds to natural raspberries to create an organic confection for her business, Lick My Spoon.

THE BUSINESS OF

LOCAL Four Sarasota foodie entrepreneurs grow their ideas into businesses.

FOOD&COOKING COVER STORY CONTINUED ON PAGE 4

2

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2014

// ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT: SPINNING CIRCLES

by Mallory Gnaegy | A&E Editor

CULTIVATING

TALENT

Most kids head off to camp in the summer, but the serious dancers head to summer intensive to sharpen their skills and hone their talents.

T

hose unfamiliar with the dance world might not know what summer intensive is. Others might mistakenly think it’s just another summer camp.

For young Sarasota dancers summer intensive is serious;

it says it in the name.

The ballet-speak refers to the rigorous auditioned summer study programs designed to allow students to hone their craft the way a professional dancer would — for six hours a day for weeks at a time. For many se-

rious dancers, it’s a necessary prerequisite for a professional career.

For others, it’s a way to improve their talents and keep their bodies in great condition during the off-season. The following are summer intensives in our area.

Sarasota Cuban Ballet School Daniela Gomez, Sarasota Cuban Ballet School

Photos by Mallory Gnaegy

Summer intensives aren’t just an American thing. Students from around the world travel to the United States to be a part of particular programs.

For Sarasota Cuban Ballet School’s 2014 summer intensive, the director set up an exchange program, DanzAmerica, which allowed five students from the National Ballet School of Cuba to train here for six weeks alongside the other students. Ariel Serrano and his wife, Wilmian Hernandez, operate Sarasota Cuban Ballet School; both are former dancers from Cuba.

Ramona de Saa, their former teacher and internationally recog-

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nized trainer of classical Cuban ballet at the National Ballet School of Cuba, also came here through the exchange to work with students.

“She created the Cuban ballet curriculum that is taught in all the ballet schools in Cuba and which we teach here at our school in Sarasota. To have our students being taught by my teacher, a world acclaimed master, is a dream come true,” Serrano says.

In addition to de Saa, choreographer Carlos dos Santos; Roberto Machado, a teacher from Mexico; and teacher Ana Julia Bemudez de Castro of the National Ballet School of Cuba work with the students.

Ivan Arambula, Sarasota Cuban Ballet School

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// ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT Fuzion Dance Artists

Ava Podewitz

The youngest dancers work on their performance

Sarasota Ballet School At the other end of University Parkway, at FSU Center for Performing Arts, there’s another particularly exciting guest teacher giving a master class to 119 students (this number has grown steadily from 2011, when it had just 26 students).

Laura Alonso, daughter of Alicia Alonso, the founder of the National Ballet of Cuba, is working with the students. She taught Director of Education Dex Honea when he was a dancer with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

“It was such a privilege to have her visiting our school and to share that experience with my students,” he says.

Honea says he took summer intensives when he was younger.

In fact, it’s how he gained exposure and was placed in a year program at Canada’s Royal Winnepeg Ballet School. For Sarasota Ballet Students, it works the same way — it’s kind of like an unofficial audition for

Sarasota School of Russian Ballet Off Cooper Creek Boulevard at the newly remodeled studios of Sarasota School of Russian Ballet, three studios of nearly 50 dancers improve their skills.

Darya Fedotova, a former professional ballet dancer and director of the school, works with young students in one room on pirouettes.

“It’s very important to keep your level up,” she says. “Our dancers come from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. — it’s lots of hours and it makes a difference.”

In the adjacent studio, the advanced, high-school-aged students work with guest teacher and former principal dancer of Orlando Ballet, Katia Garza.

Laura Alonso works with students

Courtesy of Dex Honea

the program. And it’s why the intensive includes students from around the world as far as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Sweden and Japan.

Some of the students finish Sarasota Ballet School’s five-week summer intensive and immediately start the three-week Carreño-Barbieri Festival for Pre-Professionals summer intensive the following week.

Two months of dancing, or nearly all of summer vacation, speaks to the dedication of these students.

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Time for a New Look?

At Charles Ringling’s former house on the campus of New College of Florida, Fuzión Dance Artists hosts its first official summer intensive. It’s a little different than the others for a few reasons.

For starters, it’s contemporary dance. Second, the 30 dancers range from teens all the way up through middle school teachers and adults brushing up on their skills. Third, a portion of the intensive caters to three emerging choreographers. The intensive students presented the choreographer’s work at the week’s culmination Aug. 1 and Aug. 2.

Founder of the group, Leymis Bolanos-Willmott, says it’s important to provide this access to mature dancers.

“I wanted to cultivate something where we’re nurturing people where they are at (in their careers); there needs to be a place for everyone from starving artists to choreographers,” she says.

JoAnna Ursal, Fuzion Dance Artists

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DIVERSIONS

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2014

// FOOD: BUSINESS IS COOKING

by Mallory Gnaegy | A&E Editor (continued from page 1)

THE BUSINESS OF

LOCAL Four Sarasota foodie entrepreneurs grow their ideas into businesses.

G

rocery stores are full of ideas. Every aisle has hundreds of them. Each product on the shelf started as an idea. Someone somewhere had a passion for it, and cultivated it beyond his four walls to bring it to stores, where it sits among other ideas.

That someone somewhere is in Sarasota, and these four foodie entrepreneurs share how their ideas have grown into businesses.

BEANS ARE GOOD FOR THE HEART

As a young couple, Dimitry and Holly Erez had busy jobs in consulting. She’d travel between Manhattan and Boston, and he was gone for weeks all over the world. It was exciting because they could fly to interesting places for a weekend, but both were ready to settle.

Whenever Dimitry Holly Erez Erez was in town, Holly Erez knew where to find him — he was always at the local coffee house working.

So in 2003 it was natural they open a coffee wholesale business, Latitude 23.5 Coffee and Tea. Back then they

Photos by Mallory Gnaegy

Lattitude 23.5 Coffee and Tea founder and VP Holly Erez sets her sights nationally.

REHAB • RECOVER RETURN HOME

started the foundation with another couple and simultaneously opened five retail coffee shop locations. In 2006, they bought out the other couple and shifted out of retail — they wanted to focus on wholesale distribution.

The beans are roasted in-house in a little roaster off Tallevast Road, where they roast more than 2,000 pounds of beans a day. They work directly with distributors who distribute the beans under private labels such as Island Joes out of Key West or C’est La Vie on Main Street.

You can, however, find beans under the Latitude name at all 20 Whole Food Markets in Florida.

“Growth (is our goal),” Holly Erez says. “And working with some distributors on a more national level. It would be great to have a nationwide account.”

INSPIRED BY FAMILY

James D’Esterre’s mother, Annalida D’Esterre, used to make big batches of homemade bloody mary mix in her brownstone for her neighbors to congregate, eat drink and be merry (pun intended).

That’s where the name for his business comes from, and why his mom’s face is on the label.

Annalida’s Gourmet Foods carries everything from mustards and relish to 100% lump crab cakes but is most famous (at least locally, for now) for its two bloody mary mixes and hot sauce.

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// FOOD It started in 2004 when D’Esterre and a partner opened a booth at the farmers market selling sausages, hot dogs and breakfast wraps. D’Esterre made the sauces for the booth, and they were enough of a hit that he could start his own separate venture. Now, each week he sells 300 bottles of his Absolutely Without A Doubt The Best Bloody Mary Mix. And he sees more in his future. He’s working on creating a pasteurized version of it so he can expand nationally.

Self-taught James D’Este rre prepares bloody ma “I’d like to have a little place ry mix in an industrial park where trucks go in and go out,” he says.

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For 25 years, James Urbaniak bought sausage from a Hungarian butcher in Pennsylvania. When the butcher said he was retiring and going back to the old country, Urbaniak asked him, “But where am I going to get my sausage?”

The butcher took six months teaching Urbaniak, a management consultant working in energy, how to make sausage.

When Urbaniak retired to Sarasota, he continued making authentic Eastern European sausage for friends and James Urbaniak eats sausage twice a week; family. He rented a kitchen and set up here, it’s being produced in Geier’s Sausage a booth at Sarasota Farmers Market Kitchen. “I like Polish sausage and that’s why I — and in 2008, TransAtlantic Sausage Co. started making it — it was easy and different. was born.

Urbaniak developed recipes to suit peo- Sapore Della Vita. In April, she decided to ple’s demand. When one woman asked him start making her own line of all-natural and to make seven-spice Lebanese lamb, he organic confections sold under the name met her request. When Javier Arana of Ja- “Lick My Spoon.”

Insalaco-Gaioni is self-taught from her vier’s Restaurant wanted chorizo, or Nancy Krohngold wanted Texas-style hot links for family and from her husband’s Italian mother. She’s been making jams for 13 Nancy’s Bar-B-Q, Urbaniak obliged.

The demand led to opening a retail store years — the first was an orange marmalade, and it burned. for two years.

Since her start a few months ago, she’s “It got too big for myself and my wife to have as a hobby — we were working around already received much success. Seedling Projects, a national organization focusing the clock all the time,” he says.

Instead, Urbaniak turned to Geir’s Sau- on sustainable food, recently bestowed her sage Kitchen — a USDA approved facility with its Good Food Award for her caramel that produces wholesale sausage to clients sauce confection. She also offers flavors such as Ikea and Disney World — to make such as a chocolate raspberry spread, RazzaMa Tazz; a coconut bahis sausage under his label. nana spread, CoCoNaNa; He went from producing 25 and a pistachio cream, Crema pounds of sausage weekly to more di Pistacchi. A curated sweet than 100. He sells wholesale to places box shipped monthly from such as Marie Selby Botanical GarTreatsie.com carries her line. dens, Javier’s Restaurant, Nancy’s BarAnd in September, Zingerman’s B-Q and Sarasota Polo Club. food-by-mail catalog will carry “What started as retirement her products. boomed into a business,” he says.

Everything she makes is small And now, the 68-year-old is hoping batch and she even hand labels to retire from retirement and pass his business and secret recipes on to the next and cuts all the ribbons on the cute packaging — the most she makes is 12 jars at a interested sausage enthusiast. time. She sells 200 Lick My Spoons products a week, but expects that’s about to change.

SIGHTS SET OVERSEAS Kristine Insalaco-Gaioni is a nurse.

Ideally she hopes to bring it overseas Shortly after she met her husband, they and sell them in her husband’s homefounded an Italian import company, town village in Italy, Lago Maggiore.

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2014

by Heather Merriman | Black Tie Assistant Editor

RESIZE

&

BEFORE: Kitchen

Before photos: file After photos

by Heather Merriman

remodel

LOCATION: Osprey Avenue, Southside Village DESIGNER: Beverly St. Hilaire and Abitar Furnishings GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Rock Solid Construction SQUARE FOOTAGE: 1,900 originally, 3,000 after addition DURATION OF PROJECT: Eight months

PROBLEM: 1950s Florida home in need of renovation and expansion SOLUTION: An L-shaped addition and structural remodeling to maximize the existing floor plan

W

hen Trevor and Nikki Taylor began the remodel on their new home in Southside Village, they decided to put their existing home on the market, providing ample time to sell while their new home was being transformed. What the Taylors did not anticipate was their home selling in eight days. Having to separate the renovation into phases so they could move in as quickly as possible, the family’s first, and most drastic, renovation phase was completed in eight months.

More than 1,000 square feet was added to the existing floor plan during the renovation process. Interior modifications such as wall additions and removals, new windows and window placement and an overall redesign themed “upscale beachy coastal” was implemented to bring as much light and open space into the home as possible.

AFTER: Kitchen

 An L-shaped addition connected to the rear of the home added more than 1,000 square feet and created space for a kitchen to extend from the open living area of the home, where the home’s Florida room previously existed.

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// HOME&GARDEN: BEFORE & AFTER

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2014

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// HOME&GARDEN LIVING AREA

BEFORE

Previously, the entrance led directly into the living room of the home. To add intrigue, as well as to establish a point of entry, a foyer was added off the location of the home’s original front door.

BEFORE

MASTER SUITE

AFTER

Previously, the master suite had a sitting room attached to the small 1950s bathroom. The Taylors merged the areas to create a spacious master bathroom. Working with the space they were given, they also added two large walk-in closets.

AFTER

Added foyer

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DIVERSIONS

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2014

// BLACK TIE: CAMERA READY

DESIGNING WOMEN BOUTIQUE AMBASSADOR’S GUILD SALON SERIES LUNCHEON Benefiting Designing Women Boutique Thursday, July 31, at Designing Women Boutique

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