By Sarah Kaufman. Washington Post Staff Writer.
The Washington Post.
Sunday, February 4, 2001; Page G01
HAVANA
The cabdriver knows exactly whom you're talking about. "Ah, Sarabita,
the ballet dancer!" he exclaims when you mention Rolando Sarabia, a rising
young star of Cuba's National Ballet. The dimpled 18-year-old has become so
popular that his widespread fans have glued the suffix of endearment, -ita, onto
his name like a kiss.
But if it's surprising that a ballet dancer -- and one who is not even in
the company's top rank -- should be familiar to cabbies, the scene at the
National Theater on a brilliant Saturday afternoon is even more astonishing.
Sarabia is making his debut in the leading role of Basilio in "Don
Quixote," and the theater is mobbed. Not just with graying, well-heeled
theatergoers, who would dominate the crowd at any ballet event in the United
States, but with scores of young people, many no older than Sarabia himself.
Filling the seats and clogging the aisles are beautiful young women in short
skirts and clusters of single guys in T-shirts and jeans.
In Cuba, it seems just about everyone goes to the ballet. For them, this is
no elitist art form: Tickets are cheap, performances are plentiful and the
crowds are appreciative. Witness Sarabia's dazzling flourish to end a devilish
combination -- is it nine pirouettes or 10? He is a whirling blur until his
raised leg shoots out like a switchblade, carrying him around for one last
revolution. As he lands smoothly on one knee, hundreds of throats roar at once
with a force so deafening you fear momentarily for the plaster.
It is a rock-star roar. A home-run roar. A 15th-round-knockout roar. And it
fills the theater again and again. In a country where, many Cubans say, you
learn to dance before you learn to walk, ballet has gradually become a passion
comparable to baseball and boxing. A smart program of public education and
performances in the provinces -- in the sugar cane fields, even -- has produced
a nation of knowledgeable balletgoers that boasts a world-class company.
Imagine -- a small tropical island, competing for medals against the mighty
Russians -- and winning. And (reluctantly) sending dancers like Jose Manuel
Carreno and Carlos Acosta into the top tiers of the world's leading ballet
companies. (Carreno is a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre; Acosta
stars with the Royal and Houston ballets.)
And this marvel has happened because of one woman, a ballerina of surpassing
technical strength, who began losing her eyesight at the apex of her career and
danced on, undaunted, even after she was virtually blind. A woman who convinced
Fidel Castro, fresh from his victorious revolution, that what their island
needed was a premier ballet company and a national training system to feed it.
Alicia Alonso had inspired such choreographers as Antony Tudor, Agnes de
Mille and George Balanchine, who created the central role in his masterpiece "Theme
and Variations" with her unflinching precision in mind. The legendary
dancer became a national heroine when she left American Ballet Theatre at the
height of her powers to build the company in her homeland, along with her
husband, Fernando Alonso. (They have since divorced.) The ensemble she founded
in 1948 now numbers some 70 dancers and makes frequent international tours,
including one that will bring it to the Kennedy Center in November. (The planned
repertoire includes the full-length ballet "Coppelia," choreographed
by Alonso after the versions by Arthur Saint-Leon and Marius Petipa.)
The Cuban National Ballet is also distinguished as perhaps the most
prominent racially mixed classical ballet company. While its numbers of
Afro-Cubans are not exactly in proportion to Cuba's population, they far exceed
the number of black dancers in any other leading ballet troupe. (Acosta is the
only black ballet dancer of his international stature, period.)
While some critics fault the female dancers as watered-down versions of the
young Alonso, the company has built a worldwide reputation for the power of its
male virtuosos. In a country that venerates machismo, attracting boys to ballet
can be a chore, but the company has always managed to do it.
Even if it meant raiding orphanages to find them.
The Grande Dame
Throughout Havana, ornate buildings peel and crumble from lack of
maintenance. But every summer the ballet company's studios are repaired and
painted. The two-story building, with its Spanish-style arches framing a patio
entrance behind lacy wrought iron, is situated in the once-upscale El Vedado
neighborhood, around the corner from a toe-shoe factory. Inside, a woman mops
the marble foyer. A tiled hallway leads past an open courtyard to a large
studio, where a dancer tries to time her castanets with her turns. Though it is
a typically hot, bright day, inside the building it is cool, with a damp, earthy
smell rising from the rich red-brown soil and palm trees nearby.
Upstairs, in a studio painted a strong shade of turquoise, a men's class is
in progress. Twenty dancers soar across the room in a series of whirling double
turns and hungry leaps. Their teacher, Alonso's former partner Orlando Salgado,
marks time, urging them to listen to the thumping piano.
Alonso's office, on the first floor, is a softer shade of blue. The room is
shuttered against the sunlight. Alonso sits behind a large desk that is empty
but for a few porcelain figurines. "It gives me pleasure to feel them,"
she says in lightly accented English.
With skin that's pale and powdery and her black hair pulled back under a
tight scarf, Alonso looks younger than her 80 years. She removes her customary
Jackie-O sunglasses and appears to look directly at her visitor.
She says she can see a little bit out of one eye, just shadows mostly,
barely enough to see the outline of a dancer -- sometimes. But blindness, and
the arthritis that makes walking difficult, hardly get in the way of her work.
She is fully in control of her company, though she leaves the technical aspects
of training to her roster of teachers. What concerns her most is philosophy.
On male dancers: "We teach first the style of the different ballets,
and second, to dance with movement that is stronger and more sharp and vigorous
than the woman. And he must be conscious that he is dancing with a woman as a
partner, must treat her as something delicate. So that the dance of men and
women is a contrast."
On what distinguishes Cuban ballet dancers: "It is the musical accent
that we give which is different. And it is also how quick we move, how big the
extension is in the woman, how we balance and turn. We are very strong in turns."
And it's no wonder. What her dancers lack in finesse they supply in bravura,
and this is Alonso's bequest.
"I had the strongest technique in the United States," she
declares. (Who can say, but she was surely among the standouts of her era.) "Dancers
of today are paying for my technique. They inherited it. They don't know that in
the beginning, it was my fault. Oh, my goodness gracious, what I've done to the
dancing world!"
Where It Begins
"Dance is in our skin and in our blood," says Ismael Albelo, a
specialist in dance for the Cuban ministry of culture. "It's part of our
identity, a very important part of our identity. The two cultures that formed
our identity are dancing ones."
Albelo is referring to the Spanish, who conquered Cuba in the 15th century
and virtually wiped out its indigenous population, and to the African slaves who
were brought to work the land. Rumba and salsa, among other traditional music
and dance styles, grew out of this heritage.
Ballet, however, has shallower roots.
Touring groups came to Cuba as early as the mid-1800s, when the jewel of
Austrian ballet, Fanny Elssler, performed in Havana. Legend has it that her
carriage was pulled through the streets by her newly bewitched fans.
But Ballet Alicia Alonso was one of Cuba's first classically oriented dance
companies, making its first professional appearance on Oct. 20, 1948 -- a date
that for years has marked the opening of Havana's biennial International
Festival of Ballet.
In 1950 Alonso opened a school. Known throughout the world, she had a
flourishing career in the United States as a principal dancer with American
Ballet Theatre (and appeared in Broadway musicals some six decades ago). But
once the school was founded, her focus was on building ballet in Cuba, and on
being its diva.
Castro's 1959 revolution brought about what former ballerina Loipa Araujo,
now a teacher, calls "our big luck -- a government that would support
dance. We had the possibility to just think about ballet, and not worry about
anything."
With secure funding, the school began to expand. Talent scouts were sent all
over the island seeking students. What better place to look than the orphanages?
"They didn't know where they were going," says Araujo with a
laugh, "but they were so glad to be getting out of the orphanage." One
of those motherless boys was Jorge Esquivel, who went on to become a principal
dancer with the company and won a medal at the elite international ballet
competition in Varna, Bulgaria. After defecting in 1986, he became a principal
character dancer at the San Francisco Ballet and a teacher at the company's
school.
The dancers themselves were trucked out to the factories and the countryside
to introduce ballet to the workers. "They were planting and we would come
and dance," recalls Araujo. "Afterward we would give them tickets to a
performance. And now we have a big audience that not only likes ballet but
understands it."
Feeder schools were founded in all the provinces, training children from the
first through fifth grades. After that, those selected through examinations can
attend one of the two middle schools in Havana and Camaguey. Another round of
auditions leads to the upper school in Havana, from which dancers are chosen for
the company.
Like all schooling in this communist country, ballet training is free.
Tights and leotards, free, too. Toe shoes, all free. But this is not ballet for
diversion or fitness or to fulfill parental notions of "culture." It
is taught as a profession; many parents see ballet training as a path out of
poverty for their children.
Carlos Acosta would not have set foot on a stage if not for the free
education. The youngest of 10 children in a needy family, he was sent to ballet
school by his truck-driver father in the hopes that he might emerge with a
paycheck.
Dancers are paid well by Cuban standards -- about $25 a month, which is as
much or more than doctors and many professionals make. However, though they
enjoy high public status, they must endure many of the same difficulties of
daily life -- long lines for buses and food rationing, for example -- as any
other citizen. Dancers can earn vastly more in guest appearances abroad, though
this involves the complicated process of paying a certain percentage of earnings
in taxes and to the company.
At 8:30 on a steamy Friday morning, the studios that line the National
School of Ballet, across the street from the capitol, are filled with students.
In one, a Chopin waltz is played on a piano badly in need of tuning. (The
constant humidity and voracious termites render tuning all but impossible.)
Sixteen 15-year-old girls in black leotards pull their legs up to their
shoulders as teacher Ramona de Saa calls out corrections.
While the company building is a paragon of sound maintenance, the ballet
school reflects the paucity of resources in much of Havana. The floor is warped
and splintered -- more raw exposed wood than finished surface -- and is aged to
a dull gray. It sags visibly from the dancers' leaps. Dust, blown in through the
open French doors, has settled in heaps in the corners. The girls' dancing
slippers are riddled with holes, patched over and over with tape, and worn to
the same color as the floor.
Near the entrance, a poster sternly declares, El nectar de la victoria se
bebe en la copa del sacrificio. ("The nectar of victory is drunk in the
goblet of sacrifice.")
While the pianist shifts to "As Time Goes By" -- perhaps a nod to
the school's American visitor -- de Saa drills the girls in crisp combinations
of steps and turns, not letting a moment slip by without issuing a command. She
addresses the body parts in descending order: The head, the head! Your arms!
Mucho plie! she cries. She grabs hold of one girl's inner thigh to emphasize
that the impetus for turns comes from those muscles.
There is no talking, no whispering among the students. Only the floor dares
to complain.
Hooked on Classics
Despite Cuba's economic travails -- the fall of the Soviet Union and limited
Western investment hitting it hard -- the good news is that nothing has changed
much for the Cuban National Ballet. The bad news is that nothing has changed
much for the Cuban National Ballet.
Alonso says that while the salaries have always been paid, it has been
harder lately to get "the material things: decor, costumes, toe shoes."
But she charts progress in small steps. The company now makes its own sets and
costumes, importing the fabric from Spain and stitching it here.
Castro's support, she says, has been unflagging. He was on her arm last fall
at the opening of "Swan Lake" that kicked off the international
festival (which included the Washington Ballet).
What Castro saw that night was a National Ballet in a state of suspended
animation: a company that pays rigorous respect to ballet history, and is
scrupulously attentive to the differences in style between a romantic ballet
like "Giselle" (Alonso's signature role) and a classical one like "Swan
Lake," or one with Spanish flair, such as "Don Quixote." These
are distinctions that are sadly blurred in many upper-echelon companies. It is
this reverence for classical tradition that is the Cuban ballet's chief asset.
But that same commendable quality also makes the company somewhat stodgy,
despite the dancers' technical fireworks. The productions have not been
refreshed for years; "Swan Lake" follows the Soviet model of
supplanting the lovers' double suicide with a happy ending. As for any attempts
at contemporary choreography, they are naive at best. The company's repertoire
reflects the same isolationism that characterizes the island as a whole.
Primero bailarine Oscar Torrado welcomes the emphasis on classics. Torrado,
who is Spanish, danced with the company for a year and decided to stay, though
he has only been allowed a five-year contract. "In Spain we don't have a
classical company -- it's a terrible thing," he says. "Here, the
classical repertoire is very complete. In the world, classical ballet has
disappeared."
Other dancers are less sanguine about the company's focus, expressing
impatience to learn more forward-looking choreography. And the trickle of Cuban
dancers into the United States and Europe continues, though nowadays most
dancers have an easier time negotiating departures than previously, when
defection was the only way out. Jose Manuel Carreno, who left Cuba in 1990 after
winning the Grand Prix at the competition in Jackson, Miss., returns
periodically to dance and is still listed in the roster. His brother Joel and
cousin Alihaydee have accepted invitations to dance as guests with the
Washington Ballet, though dates have yet to be determined.
And Sarabia is biding his time, waiting for the moment when he can carve out
a niche in the international arena. "I would like to be on some other
stages, maybe with the Royal Ballet or ABT," he says, speaking through an
interpreter. "I would like to work in other companies but still come here
from time to time to dance, like Jose Manuel and Carlos Acosta.
"I want to stay here," he says, dimples deepening as he smiles, "but
I would like to learn some other styles."
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