‘Don Quixote’ role finds dancer tilting at Houston ballet history
Mónica Gómez, like principal before her, has ties to her native Cuba
Mónica Gómez was not in leaping mode during a recent “day off ” at Houston Ballet’s studios, unless you count the mental exercise required to jump nonstop from one interviewer to the next.
She looked delicate in striped silk pants and a cream top with black bows at the cuffs of its puffed sleeves. A native of Cuba, she meekly apologized for her accented but fluent English, adding to the already considerable charm exuded by her huge, expressive brown eyes.
After defecting from Cuba to Puerto Rico in 2014, she joined Houston Ballet three years ago as an apprentice and quickly rose to the rank of soloist. She has already performed the kinds of roles normally reserved for principal dancers, leading second casts for “The Tempest” and “Mayerling.”
This week, as Houston Ballet revives its longshelved production of “Don Quixote,” Gómez is scheduled to debut as Kitri on opening night — a leap that reflects the company’s confidence in her. Principal dancer Charles-Louis Yoshiyama is her Basilio.
Gómez wasn’t yet born when the Houston Ballet’s former artistic director Ben Stevenson’s production of Miguel de Cervantes’ centuries-old tale
premiered in 1995, and she was still a student in Havana when the company last staged the ballet 12 years ago.
But theatergoers who were around in the 1990s remember “Don Q” as one of the most exciting classical shows in Houston Ballet’s history. Stevenson drew from Marius Petipa’s mid-19th-century version of the story to create a vehicle for the energetic personalities of Houston native Lauren Anderson and a young Cuban ballet sensation, Carlos Acosta, who had joined the company just two years before.
The Houston Post’s Carl Cunningham was among the critics who gave them a big thumbs-up. “Thursday's opening might well have been renamed the Lauren and Carlos Show,” he wrote after the premiere in February 1995. “Both dancers were dazzling in a tireless display of flawless technique, leaping high and long, whipping around onstage and turning in the air with perfect equilibrium, and doing all sorts of quick, clean footwork in between.”
Anderson and Acosta weren’t just brilliant dancers with highwattage personalities. They were competitive. If one executed 10 perfect fouettés, the other would answer with 11 or 12 of the fiendish spins. If one leapt 4 feet off the ground, the other would go for 5. The jolly, circusy tone of Ludwig Minkus’ score and the accelerating speed of its grand pas de deux fed their goodnatured battle of classical mettle, and the audience ate it up.
“It was not, ‘I’m going to be better,’ ” Anderson said recently. “It was just, ‘OK, let’s see what you can do with this.’ ” He was one of the few partners with whom she felt she didn’t have to “downsize” anything. (Dominic Walsh was another.) “I could go all out. Not to change the integrity of the piece … just trying to rise to it and set a standard.”
Acosta went on to become a longtime star of London’s Royal Ballet, and Anderson thrilled Houston fans until she retired in 2006. Both performed well into their 40s, among the most popular dancers of their generation.
Anderson has directed Houston Ballet’s outreach program for more than a decade and coached occasionally across the country; but coaching Gómez has brought her back into Houston’s studios as an artist for the first time.
“It’s almost like being transported back in time,” Anderson said.
Both dancers grew up yearning to perform the role of Kitri the way other ballerinas dream of doing more prim, white-tutu roles such as Giselle. Gómez has had bits of “Don Q” in her bones since she was a student. She won an international ballet competition in Havana with a performance of the grand pas. However, that dance accounts for only a few minutes of the full, three act-ballet.
Anderson has pushed her hard, helping Gómez build stamina and bring more depth to her acting, encouraging her to enjoy the moment, feel it and make it her own.
“She has this amazing personality,” Gómez said. “She transmits so much energy to you, it makes you do more.”
Gómez’s technique didn’t need help, Anderson said. “Stuff that’s supposed to be hard is easy for her. It’s mostly rhythm, nuances and the feeling Ben wanted generated through that character.”
The National Ballet of Cuba, where both Acosta and Gómez began their careers, trains its dancers in the flamboyant Russian style, which emphasizes technical theatrics. At Houston Ballet, Gómez said, she is learning that details matter. “It’s not all about turns, jumps and technical stuff. It’s how to interpret your character and feel all the emotions as you’re dancing; and being more delicate and precise.”
She didn’t want to leave her parents and an older brother behind, but like Acosta before her, Gómez felt limited by the career opportunities in Cuba. “He left such an impression here. It’s amazing to be in the same place he was,” she said.
Their circumstances were different: Acosta, from a very large and poor family, started as a breakdancer and came late to ballet. Gómez is the daughter of an engineer.
In some ways, she has more in common with Anderson, who had to overcome prejudice as one of the first African-American principals, with a muscular physique, in the lily-white world of classical ballet. While teachers at Cuba’s national ballet school saw Gómez’s potential when she was very young, they eventually decided she wouldn’t be tall enough to make it as a professional. She met their discouragement with steely determination.
Anderson and Gómez both trained with teachers who pushed them to try things over and over again. “She has a completely different personality,” Anderson said, “but we’re both going to do it until we get it.”
After she defected, Gómez spent several months as a guest artist in Florida and Pennsylvania while she got her legal status in order and auditioned for a full-time job. She aimed for Houston Ballet because the company had a reputation for caring more about talent than the physical attributes of its dancers. She also loved the company’s repertoire, its history with Acosta and its current Venezuelan principal, Karina González.
In fact, González’s face appears in Houston Ballet’s “Don Quixote” ads. She would have been the shoo-in for the opening-night Kitri slot if life hadn’t intervened: She became pregnant. González and her husband, former Houston Ballet dancer Rupert Edwards, welcomed their daughter a few weeks ago. (She’ll be back.)
Gómez said she has missed seeing González in the ballet’s studios. “I watch her. I want to be like her,” she said. “She’s so beautiful.”
Of course, she is also grateful to have an important door opened. The history of ballet is full of moments like this, although they happen more often because of injuries.
Stevenson’s “Don Q” asks almost as much of its lead ballerina as “Swan Lake,” which demands both a sense of good and evil, light and dark, lyricism and sharpness with the contrasting dual roles of Odette, the white swan, and Odile, the black one. His Kitri is a lively bundle of fun in Act 1 but appears in a different guise in Act 2 as the old man Don Quixote’s dream object, Dulcinea. Then Act 3 brings the fiery grand pas.
Bravura dancers have to tame their wilder impulses to master the Dulcinea section. “The energy is different,” Anderson said. “It’s purposeful, exacting. You have to think about doing less, not more.”
Otherwise, the veteran’s only frustration is convincing the younger generation that all they want cannot be gleaned from watching videos. The age-old tradition of fellowship, from coach to dancer, can’t be replaced, Anderson said. “It is art.”
Gómez said she and Yoshiyama have a bit of competition going, like their predecessors. “I like hard stuff, when the choreography gets complicated,” she said. “It pushes me more. After he does a perfect variation, then it’s my turn.”
She also hopes to emulate Acosta’s off-stage attitude.“He’s a nice person, really humble and so talented,” she said. “For me, it is very important for a person to be humble and never forget where you came from.”