American FLASH, Cuban SOUL - Washington Ballet performs in Cuba

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2001 by Jean Battey Lewis

Washington Ballet's trip to Havana was a homecoming of sorts for its director

Off the curving marble staircase in Havana's Gran Teatro, in a high-ceilinged room with floor-length windows and peeling paint, a balletmaster conducts a class for boys in their final year of training. The tropical sun streams in on their glistening bodies as they soar across the room in powerful jetes. "El publico! El publico! El publico!" the teacher shouts at them as they leap, pounding his cane for emphasis as they come to a dramatic finish, arms spread wide.

As their teacher reminds them, el publico, the public, is one of the defining elements of dance in Cuba, the country with perhaps the world's most fervent dance followers. And it is impressed upon the neophyte dancers that their job is to move that audience with the power and presentation of their performance.

Dance is a central part of life in Cuba. Thousands flock to performances by the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Hundreds sit and stand in a tree-lined courtyard on a Saturday afternoon, watching Ballet Folklorico dancers and musicians. The audience sings along with the performers, swinging their arms in rhythm, sometimes jumping up and joining in.

The National Ballet's director, Alicia Alonso, occupies a cherished spot in the national psyche. As a ballerina of world renown who danced into her 70s, who with her then-husband Fernando Alonso built a dance tradition and a company from scratch, she is universally revered. Now nearly blind and crippled with arthritis, Alonso still makes an entrance when she enters her box at the theater; the crowd leaps to its feet and cheers her, night after night.

It was Alonso who invited Septime Webre, the new artistic director of the Washington Ballet, to bring his company to dance at Cuba's seventeenth International Ballet Festival last October.

Webre has ties to Cuba that made the trip especially meaningful. He was born in the United States, but his mother was Cuban and his older siblings spent their childhood in Cuba until the family left after the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959. Webre grew up listening to their tales, but first visited the island only a year ago.

His company's visit reflects the improved climate of people-to-people meetings the two countries are now encouraging. Taking full advantage of that, Webre arrived in Havana for the festival with 130 dancers, students, choreographers, theater directors and presenters from around the United States to meet and interact with their Cuban counterparts.

What they found was a people low in material resources--dingy rehearsal rooms, poor-quality pointe shoes--but brimming with passion for dance.

Cuban dance technique is very strong--nearly everyone can do thirty-two fouettes, throwing in doubles and turning on a dime. Balances on pointe are held for prolonged lengths. And the men are prodigiously powerful, with razor-sharp landings.

The state-run training that produces these results is highly organized and extremely effective. Fernando Alonso is credited with shaping what is known as the Cuban technique. He says he threw in everything he had learned from studying and dancing in the U.S. with George Balanchine and others in the '30s and '40s.

"But really" the debonair Alonso says, "it was shaped by the Cubans themselves, their love of dance and their energy. That's the truth."

Children admitted to local schools of dance after a rigorous selection process have free tuition. Serious dance training is given to students from ages 9 to 14 in local schools around the country. After five years, there's another winnowing out, and for the final three years of advanced training the youngsters study either in Havana or Camaguey, the home of Cuba's second company. The best of them will enter the National Ballet.

Laura, a lively 18-year-old coming out of class, said she hoped to join the company and would like to dance some day with a major group like American Ballet Theatre or the New York City Ballet. Pointe shoes are hard to come by, so Laura says she has to be careful with hers. Students seem to use them a lot less in class than Americans do, and their footwork is less pliant.

Daily transportation to class is another problem. One peso, the equivalent of about five cents, buys five trips on a bus known as "the camel" because of its odd humped shape. But buses are infrequent and passengers are packed in so tightly it's a wonder they can breathe. So Laura was not able to make the trip to see the Washington Ballet, the first American ballet company to perform in Cuba in forty years.

In the next studio at Gran Teatro, the boys are finishing class. A boy named Servillo says transportation makes his day very long: "I have to get up at five in the morning to get the bus, and we finish late in the evening; there's only time to ride home and go to bed."

His friend Roma lives near the school, so transportation is not a problem for him. But still, Roma says, "The life of a dancer involves a lot of sacrifice. We're young; we like going to a discotheque or to the beach. Sometimes we have to forget about that and devote ourselves to dance. But we like it anyway."