At the Cuban Club this weekend, Tampa City Ballet opens another chapter in “La Septima,” the dance theater project it has been developing for the last six years. If you attend a performance—and you should—you’ll find yourself immersed in a saga that has been unfolding for more than 100 years: the passionate, richly multi-cultural history of Ybor City.
“How many places have the history that Ybor has?” muses Paula Nuñez, who conceived and directed. “Just on Seventh Avenue you have so many stories.”
La Septima is, of course, the Spanish moniker for Ybor City’s main drag, AKA E Seventh Avenue. Nuñez founded America’s Ballet School in 2002 before launching Tampa City Ballet in 2012 and transitioning it into a nonprofit in 2018. She first found herself captivated by the district’s unique character while rehearsing her dancers for a piece about Frida Kahlo at HCC in 2019.
“I felt a profound sense of belonging,” she remembers. A professional ballet dancer in her native Venezuela and in Europe before coming to Tampa, she has been teaching at the University of South Florida for 15 years. With a small group of TCB dancers, she began researching the history of Ybor City in archives, diaries, oral histories, newspaper accounts, and—in what became the keystone of that research—“Tampa: Impressions of an Emigrant” by Wenceslao Gálvez y Delmonte, published in 1897 and translated in 2020 by Noel Smith, now USF’s curator of Latin American and Caribbean Art.
Through several incarnations over the years, the project evolved into “La Septima,” which launched onstage last weekend at the New Tampa Performing Arts Center (NTPAC), continues at the Cuban Club Oct. 9-10, and culminates in a salon at USF on Oct. 17 featuring performance excerpts and conversation.
La Septima at the Cuban Club, Fri. Oct. 9, 7:30 p.m.; Sat. Oct. 10, 4 & 7:30 p.m.; Sun. Oct. 11, 4 p.m., 2010 N Avenida Republica de Cuba, Tampa
La Septima Salon, Sat. Oct. 17, 6 p.m., USF Theatre Center, 3837 USF Holly Dr., Tampa. tampacityballet.org
The stage version on Saturday night was riveting from the start. As the audience entered, the scene on stage was spare: a haphazard pile of chairs draped in muslin aprons and illuminated in a cone of light. Next to them, a woman, her face partially concealed by a sheet of red ringlets, sat tuning a guitar. As the lights came down, the woman—Colombian coloratura soprano Daniella Mass—began to sing “Malagueña” with a voice of such piercing clarity and anguish that it immediately grabbed our attention.
Gálvez, the author whose memoir inspired “La Septima,” was personified by two performers: actor Cornelio Aguilera and dancer Brandon Carpio. Aguilera’s Gálvez brought gravitas and a sense of wonder to his role as narrator, reading excerpts from the book as he typed at a desk perched above the stage (Gálvez was himself a lector who read to tabacaleros, AKA tobacco workers, as they worked). Carpio, moving with exceptional agility, achingly conveyed the ambition and longing of the “Emigrant.”
Following the introduction of Gálvez, the rest of the company entered, grabbing aprons and setting up chairs for one of the evening’s most gripping sequences. As the click-click-click of the typewriter morphed into a percussive recorded score, the seated dancers chopped and pulled and stretched in perfect unison, echoing the movements of the Ybor City tobacco “strippers” they observed during their research. The sense of both the beauty and necessity of labor was palpable, as the cigar factory workers listened to readings of “Madame Bovary” while dreaming of a liberated Cuba and a better life in the U.S. “They were,” in the words of Gálvez, “rolling revolutions.”
At The Cuban Club, “La Septima” will necessarily unfold differently from the experience at the arts center. Guests will enter through the lower level of the club, where they’ll be surrounded by the denizens of a 1920s speakeasy, then ascend to the upper floors for subsequent episodes. And, adds Nuñez, the proximity of the performers will make an impression. “You’ll have dancers sweating over you. You’ll hear them breathing.”
But I have no doubt that elements like the cigar workers’ dance will dazzle again in the immersive setting.
AI-assisted projections by Santiago Echeverry evoke vintage images of the historic district—the tobacco factories, the tunnels, even the newspapers of the day—enhancing but never overwhelming the dancers. The recorded music score (in addition to Mass’ live vocals) melds contemporary and classical, from Big Band to techno to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Lighting by Joseph Smith dynamically establishes each milieu.
And the TCB dancers perform brilliantly, in solo and ensemble, in contemporary styles as well as ballet. Shelby Russ exudes power and grace as the Cuban independence fighter Carolina la Patriota. The gorgeous Maria Fernanda Papa and Humberto Rivera Blanco perform a steamy pas de deux. Tall, rail-thin Bailey Lord, as the legendary white-suited gangster Charlie Wall, strides about menacingly, introducing the temptation of a single white ball—the bolita, central to the lethal gambling racket he controlled. (There’s a breathtaking moment in the staging when multiple white balls drop from above as people struggle to catch them.)
As these vignettes suggest, the scope of La Septima extends from the time of Cuban expats through the eras of Jim Crow, Prohibition, and even into the present. The dance varies throughout, from joyous lifts to tribal conflict, from precise linear formations to moments of mournful stillness.
“I didn’t want to do just a simple history, but also the relation between that time and our time,” said Nuñez, who set the choreography in collaboration with her dancers. “If you want to see the poetic side, you have it. The dark side, you have it. The fun, you have it.”
And beyond her drive to tell the story of Ybor, an even bigger dream is embodied in “La Septima”: transforming Tampa City Ballet into a fully-funded professional company. TCB pays its corps dancers on a monthly basis, but the organization operates on a shoestring compared with the multi-million-dollar budgets of Sarasota Ballet and Miami City Ballet, both of which enjoy local support and national renown.
“I want to leave a company that could have a legacy,” Nuñez told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “To have a future and be part of Tampa, to go on tour and represent the city.”
Judging by “La Septima,” the city’s first professional dance company deserves all that and more.
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This article appears in Oct. 08 – 14, 2026.
