Four months ago Houston Ballet demi soloist Elivelton Tomazi got word that he'd be dancing the role of one of the stepsisters in Stanton Welch's Cinderella which meant, of course, that he'd be en pointe. Something he'd never done before.

He bought some point shoes and started rehearsing in between performances of The Nutcracker. Members of Les Ballets Trockadero de Montecarlo, the famous all men's comic ballet that all go en point) dropped in as did their director. "They're so so good. I felt horrible. The class was amazing but I was not at their level. I wish I had more classes with them."

He also got a lot of help from ballet masters Steven Woodgate and Hayden Stark, both of whom danced as stepsisters before. "I'm not going to lie. My first month — horrible. I was telling [female dancers] I don't know how you can do this. I would have quit ballet my first year. But they helped me a lot. They helped me how to protect my toes, my feet."  Tomazi said laughing.

At the same time as he's mastered his blisters, he considers himself very lucky to get to dance in all the performances, providing much of the comic relief of the ballet set to the beautiful music of Sergey Prokofiev. "I'm Florinda six times and Grizabella twice."

As other Houston audiences discovered when Welch's  Cinderella, developed for The Australian Ballet Ballet, was first performed here in 2008, Welch's title character does not exactly follow the story line perpetuated by Disney. It doesn't embrace the Grimm's Brothers darkness either (to fit into the glass slipper one stepsister cuts off her toe, the other her heel) but this Cinderella is much more active than just a girl who gets to go to the ball in a blue dress.

In fact, at the end it is not so much who picks her, but who she decides is the best person to be with — not always royalty as it turns out.

Tomazi comes from Brazil where he describes his relatives as a big Italian family. They run a clothing manufacturing company and all live close to each other, he said. "I’m the only one I’m the crazy one who went out of the country."   Although none of his family was involved in ballet, Tomazi started taking lessons at age 8 after the Bolshoi which has schools in other parts of the world, picked him to be a student.

"My first year at Bolshoi I hated it. It had to be first position, second position. You have to be like this. It's awful. But my second year I started liking it. I started dancing more.  I started learning choreography and variations. So that's when I started loving it but my first year was not easy."

Graduating when he was 17, he entered a number of competitions and got a scholarship to The Joffrey Ballet in Chicago. He stayed there till 2019 when he auditioned at Houston Ballet. "I was looking for something different, more challenging."

Although he had hesitations at first, after he he became better acquainted with Welch's version of Cinderella, he became a fan. "I think it's a beautiful version. It's a different idea of Cinderella. it’s a more deep. It was so beautiful how Stanton can create a deep meeting of love and friendship and family.  I am not a choreographer but it's so beautiful when they do the pas de deux and the solos. Everything has a meaning."

As it turns out, going en pointe is not the only tricky part of playing a stepsister, Tomazi said. "For the first act I wear a dress but because Florinda she’s more like chubby so I have a costume it's kind of like a sauna suit that makes me sweat a lot.  In the second act I have a longer dress that’s impossible to dance with but I’m getting better at not stepping on my dress."


Performances are scheduled for February 22 through March 3 at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday, Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Wortham Center, 501 Texas. For more information, call 713-227-2787 or visit houstonballet.org. $25-$220.