Granaroli, 50, lives in Woodland Hills, Calif., with his wife, Gabriella Brown, and their two girls, Alessandra, who is almost 8, and Daniella, 6. He is a screen writer and has created theme parks all over the world from Dubai to Australia after a dancing career in the late 1970s and 19780s that lasted more than a decade.
He grew up in Santa Barbara, Calif. and he had played football and acted in plays in high school and had taken one ballet class but it never clicked until that moment when he saw Barishnikov leap across the stage. "When I saw Barishnikov dance I thought, "He's an athlete." It was the first time I saw anyone dance like that. I thought, "I'm an athlete too and I can do that."
Granaroli dropped out of college and came home. He began taking every dance class available at his local dance school. He took 22 classes at week at all levels and with all different ages and he would stay at the studio all day dancing. "It was the most exciting time of my life and I would see something and I would just do it," he explains.
He grew up with a lot of theater people but everyone, including him, assumed that if you were dancing "you certainly had to be gay. " And when Granaroli decided to become a dancer friends and some family members questioned whether he was gay. A lot of my friends were very skeptical about it, they couldn't relate to it," he recalls. "They'd make disparaging comments about gays - "faggots." People were very uncomfortable with it."
So Granaroli lost many friends during that time partly because of their prejudice but also because he was so focused on dancing. "It was the first thing other than athletics that I loved to do," he says. "It just didn't matter."
Granaroli trained in Los Angeles and then went to the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia as an apprentice for three years. His big break came when he was trying out for the American Ballet Theater. His hero, Mikhail Barishnikov, walked in to the class and then left. The teacher came to him afterward and told him that Barishnikov wanted to see him. Barhsnikov told him, "I want you to join the company tomorrow." He stayed with the ballet company for four years and played Paris in a 1985 production of "Romeo and Juliet." But he left ballet for good at age 30 when he hurt his hip. After doing two more years of theater dancing, he began taking classes and soon launched his new career.
Granaroli says his parents were supportive but puzzled about his career choice until they came to see him perform at the Metropolitan Opera House. "They started to say, "Look what he's accomplished," he says. "They were so proud of me. They realized they'd never seen someone work so hard at something."
Being a straight man in a world where there are a lot of gay men was sometimes challenging, Granaroli says. He recalled one director who offered to help his career if Granaroli would sleep with him. For some choreographers and directors, "it seems like a conquest to get the straight guys to sleep with them."
But Granaroli adds that it generally wasn't a problem. "I was so confident I was doing what I wanted that it was never a huge issue for me because I was very confident I was doing what I wanted," he says. "It was never a huge issue for me because I was very confident about myself. I wasn't ambivalent at all about it."
Granaroli's wife, Gabriella Brown, teaches dancing and she still sees very few boys in ballet classes, Granaroli says. Parents want to know why a boy dancer isn't playing football or tennis, he says. Male dancers get positive feedback only with achievement, he says. "It comes later with excellence or achievement, then the parents or friends are proud of you," he explains. "It's a threshold you have to step across. People wonder why you are doing it, what you get out of it. When you take a ballet class, if you have any talent at all, you immediately understand the fun of it."
Dance is "endlessly challenging," Granaroli explains. "You never really master it. You can play basketball and it doesn't matter how you look - you just have to master it. In athletics, the goal is to win or achieve - it doesn't matter how you look. In dance you ahve to do those very difficult things - dance, jump and lift other people over your head, but you have to look perfect at the same time."
"You can't do one thing well," he adds. "You have to be really versatile, you have to look good when you do it and you have to do many different things. I used to love partnering and working out different lifts with girls and it was so athletic and so challenging. It was really fun and it was really fun and I was a huge jumper. I loved to jump so that was a big part of it for me."
Boys need role models who can point them in the direction of dance like Barishnikov did for him, Granaroli says. Dance shows like "Dancing With the Stars," and "So You Think You Can Dance?" are helping to break some of those barriers but there are no break-out male stars in the ballet world like Barishnikov, he says.
But ballet also isn't part of American culture the way it is part of European culture. Dancing also has to be a labor of love because it's so hard to make a living at it, Granaroli points out. Dancers also have to have second careers, Granaroli says. He was able to switch careers through some classes he took when he was injured but no everyone is so lucky.
"People are much more aware of dance," he says. "Dancing is looking like a reasonable and rational goal to have. Once it's celebrated parents and friends are more open to it."
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