Final bows

On Sunday, Cuban-born Pennsylvania Ballet principal dancer Riolama Lorenzo will perform with the company for the last time.

On Tuesday, after more than half a lifetime of ballet buns, "I'm getting my hair chopped. And I'm going for short-short." She displays an iPhone photo of French actress Audrey Tautou with hair cropped to an inch or two.

"Isn't it fabulous?," she raves. "And then the day after, I leave for Disney World. We're driving the minivan. How soccer-mom can you get?"

At only 34, Lorenzo is leaving several years ahead of the typical retirement age of 40. But she has been dancing for 18 years and has two small children, ballet-loving Sebastian, 4, and 6-month-old daughter Rio Maria. The next phase of her life is about them.

"I've been working since I was 16 - that's when I started with City Ballet. I needed a break."

 Ballet is in Lorenzo's blood. Her mother retired from Ballet Nacional de Cuba just three years into her career when her daughter was born in 1977. When Lorenzo was not quite 3, Fidel Castro permitted tens of thousands of Cubans to leave as part of the months-long Mariel boatlift; Lorenzo's grandfather in Miami had a friend with a fishing boat who brought the family to the United States.

In Miami, she started formal Russian-Cuban-style ballet classes at 7 with her mother, who still teaches there. At 14, she was accepted by the prestigious Harid Conservatory in Boca Raton; two years later she ascended to New York City Ballet's School of American Ballet, and then in 1995 to the company itself, where she spent five years.

For a while, she led a charmed life. Founding choreographer Jerome Robbins first chose her for a principal role while she was still in the school's summer workshop. And at City Ballet, as a teenage corps dancer, "I did Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I did 'Emeralds' in Jewels. I did a lot of great roles, danced with Jock Soto and Robert LaFosse.

"I got to do a lot of stuff, but for some reason [ballet master in chief] Peter Martins never took me out of the corps de ballet. And it was frustrating - I was being given these roles, and I never had a bad review."

After Robbins' death, Lorenzo, dealing with injuries and wondering if she'd ever get ahead, moved back to Miami, went to college, and stopped dancing for several years. She met her husband, Javier Lasa, and followed him when to Baltimore when he started medical school at Johns Hopkins. And slowly she began to dance again, and to think about dance companies, specifically Pennsylvania Ballet, only 90 minutes away.

When she auditioned in 2002 for artistic director Roy Kaiser at the Academy of Music and was offered a contract on the spot - for the corps - her father was not pleased.

"It was hard for my dad, because he had seen me in these roles, and then to come to a smaller company, in the corps de ballet. I said, 'Dad, don't worry. Roy said if it goes as planned I'll be a soloist next year, and then who knows where that will go?'

"And it happened just like that: I came here and the first thing I did was Apollo, in the corps, and the following year I was a soloist. And I've gotten to do the Firebird as a soloist, Odette-Odile as a soloist when Chris Wheeldon came."

Lorenzo was choreographer Wheeldon's opening-night star when his Swan Lake premiered in 2004, even though she was a soloist and two principal dancers were cast on other nights. The next year she rose to principal.

In her decade in Philadelphia, audiences have loved her for her lines, consistency, interpretation of roles, gorgeous arched feet, and presence on stage.

"I have just really enjoyed watching her develop into a real artist, a true artist," Kaiser says. "From the first time I saw her - and I saw her dance at New York City Ballet long before she came to Philadelphia to audition for me - she was always talented, that was just evident from the beginning. . . . She just had wonderful physical attributes, and extension, line, all those things we look for in a classical dancer. But I feel like, during her time here over the last 10 years, she really matured, she became more of a presence on the stage."

Lorenzo's retirement leaves Pennsylvania Ballet with only three other female principal dancers and two principal males.

"The roster is a little thin at the top on paper," Kaiser acknowledges, "but it will fill out. There will be some movement in the company, and we're looking at dancers outside the company as well. I see over 300 dancers a year."

Most of the company's eight soloists have been promoted from the corps in the last few years. As Kaiser says, "I don't know that 'young' . . . necessarily equals 'not a lot of experience.' We have some really wonderful talent."

As for Lorenzo, he says, "She's the mother of two now. That's pretty amazing, actually."

She agrees.

"Having two vs. one is like - it's not simple math. One plus one does not equal two. It's exponentially different. . . . It's a lot, and then with a career like this, you have to almost be selfish. You have to keep yourself up. You have to be committed. It's not just a 9-to-5 job."

Her finale with the company will be dancing Matthew Neenan's Keep. (The program also includes his 11:11 and The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, by William Forsythe.) As her 18 years on the stage come to a close, reality is starting to sink in.

"Yesterday we had some donors come to watch Keep, and I got nervous. I had that, like, butterfly feeling in my stomach and Zach started to get a little emotional, and I started to get a little emotional, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is finally happening.' "

Lorenzo says she plans to take off for good long while. Kaiser asked her to teach in the new Pennsylvania Ballet School, which is to open in the fall when the company moves to its new headquarters on North Broad Street.

"I told him I would love to - but in a couple of years."

Riolama Lorenza rehearses and talks about retiring at

www.philly.com/ballerina EndText

Contact writer Ellen Dunkel at edunkel@philly.com