By Sarah Kaufman, Washington Post.
Los Angeles Times. Thursday, February 15,
2001
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 is so
popular that his fans have glued the suffix of endearment, -ita, onto his name
like a kiss.
The scene at the National Theater on a brilliant Saturday afternoon is
even more astonishing. Sarabia is debuting, in "Don Quixote," and the
theater is mobbed. Not just with graying, well-heeled theatergoers but with
scores of young people, many no older than Sarabia himself: beautiful young
women in short skirts, guys in T-shirts and jeans.
For Cubans, it seems, ballet is no elitist art form: Tickets are cheap,
performances are plentiful and 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 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 and a world-class company.
Imagine: a small tropical island competing for medals against the
mighty Russians--and winning. And sending dancers such as 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.)
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 even after she was virtually blind. 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. She became a national heroine when she left
American Ballet Theatre to build the company in her homeland, along with her
then-husband, Fernando Alonso. The ensemble she founded in 1948 now numbers some
70 dancers and tours frequently.
* * *
The Cuban National Ballet is also perhaps the most prominent racially
mixed classical ballet company. While its numbers of Afro-Cubans aren't exactly
in proportion to Cuba's population, they far exceed the number of black dancers
in any other leading troupe. Acosta is the only black ballet dancer of his
international stature, period.
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.
Throughout Havana, ornate buildings peel and crumble from lack of
maintenance. But every summer the ballet company's studios are repaired and
painted. In one office, shuttered against the sunlight, Alonso sits behind a
large desk empty but for a few porcelain figurines. With pale, powdery skin and
black hair pulled back under a scarf, Alonso looks younger than her 80 years.
She removes her customary Jackie O sunglasses.
She says she can see a bit out of one eye, just shadows, mostly. But
blindness, and the arthritis that makes walking difficult, hardly interfere with
her work. She fully controls her company, though she leaves the technical
training to her 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."
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.
"Oh, my goodness gracious, what I've done to the dancing world!"
* * *
"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 to the African slaves brought in to work the land. Rumba and salsa,
among other 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.
Known worldwide, Alonso had a flourishing U.S. career as a principal
dancer with American Ballet Theatre. But in 1950 she opened a school, and her
focus became building ballet in Cuba, and on being its diva.
Castro's 1959 revolution brought about what former ballerina Loipa
Araujo 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.
All the provinces had feeder schools, training children from the first
through fifth grades. Those selected 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.
It is taught as a profession; many parents see it as their children's path out
of poverty.
Carlos Acosta wouldn't have set foot on stage if not for the free
education. The youngest of 10 children, he was sent to ballet school by his
truck driver father in hopes he might emerge with a paycheck.
Dancers are paid well by Cuban standards: about $25 a month, as much or
more than doctors and many professionals make. They enjoy high public status but
must endure many of the same difficulties of daily life, such as food rationing
and long lines for buses, as anyone else. 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.
* * *
Amid Cuba's economic travails, the Cuban National Ballet is a company
in a state of suspended animation: it pays rigorous respect to ballet history,
and is scrupulously attentive to the differences in style between a romantic
ballet like "Giselle" 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.
But that also makes the company somewhat stodgy. Attempts at
contemporary choreography are naive at best. The repertoire reflects the same
isolationism that characterizes the island.
Primero bailarine Oscar Torrado, who is Spanish, welcomes the emphasis
on classics. "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 express impatience to learn more forward-looking
choreography. And the trickle of dancers to the United States and Europe
continues.
Sarabia is biding his time. "I would like to be on some other
stages, maybe with the Royal Ballet or ABT," he says. "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, smiling, "but I would
like to learn some other styles."
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