San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Choreographer finally gets his turn at Smuin
When Smuin Contemporary Ballet Artistic Director Celia Fushille visited Cuba for the first time, she dropped in on a dance rehearsal. There, in a theater with no electricity, was a dancer she could not take her eyes off.
“He had these graceful long arms and this wingspan that’s incredible, like an eagle,” Fushille recalled. “And the way he covers ground, he’s like a panther, with a blend of control and fluidity I just loved.”
The year was 2012, the dancer was Osnel Delgado, and Fushille knew in an instant she wanted him to work with her dancers in San Francisco. Now, at last, Delgado is here. Rushing in from teaching company class in Smuin’s Potrero Hill studios on a hot September day, Delgado said he’s “so captivated by the passion of this company.” They’ve been working hard on his new dance “The Turntable,” which premiered in Smuin’s “Dance Series 1” on Sept. 16 in Mountain View and continues in San Francisco and Walnut Creek.
The intervening decade has brought tremendous change to Delgado’s life and career. When Fushille first spotted him, he had recently left Cuba’s most prestigious modern dance company, Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, and was dancing with Ebony, a company founded by his father.
Just six months after Fushille’s trip, Delgado co-founded his own group, Malpaso Dance Company. That company quickly commissioned two new works, one by lauded American choreographer Ronald K. Brown and one by Delgado, who had been making dances since he was a young boy. Both proved hits, leading to Malpaso being named an associate company of New York’s Joyce Theater, which now books Delgado’s troupe for regular seasons there and around the world.
But even with the Joyce managing Malpaso’s bookings, navigating the complexities of communications to Cuba, not to mention shifting U.S. policy, was tricky. Then, just as Delgado made it to San Francisco and began his Smuin commission in 2020, the pandemic hit, and the season was canceled.
All of which is to say that having Delgado in the studios this month has been a longawaited, surreal and inspiring journey for the San Francisco dance company.
“Honestly, you’re watching him move, and you forget you’re supposed to be paying attention to learn the choreography, his movement is so beautiful,” said Smuin member Tessa Barbour.
The dance Delgado created is an exciting stretch for Smuin’s dancers. “The Turntable” features an actual revolving disc at its center, upon which Barbour sometimes stands. The dance itself is not oriented to the audience, but composed in the round, with a full ensemble of 16 swirling around the literal and symbolic center, to music ranging from Cuban violinist William Roblejo’s arrangement
of the jazz tune “Wayne’s Thang,” to bittersweet boleros and tracks from the Bay Area’s own Kronos Quartet.
“It’s about a search for happiness, joy, the imaginary person we are looking for,” Delgado explained. “I think after the pandemic, all this isolation, I made the decision to create things to connect people, even to connect the dancers to each other. So, there are two main characters trying to find each other throughout the piece, but everyone is part of the same story. The whole stage is the turntable.”
Far more challenging than the concept, for the Smuin dancers, is the movement style. It draws on Delgado’s ballet background and training at the National Dance School of Havana, but also on modern dance, folkloric forms and Cuban social dances.
“Usually for ballerinas it’s about creating an outward image, and you’re thinking about making the best line,” said Barbour. “With Osnel’s movement, I’m being asked to step outside my comfort zone and think about not how it looks but how it feels. And every time you dance it, it has to be as though for the first time — you have to surrender to the vulnerability of the moment.”
To Fushille, who became Smuin’s artistic leader after the death of founder Michael Smuin in 2007, these qualities of Delgado’s style made him ideal for connecting the company to both its past and its evolving present, in which the troupe is dancing a stylistically widening range of works by international choreographers like Amsterdam-based Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, whose bold “Requiem for a Rose” is also on this program.
“In a strange way, Osnel reminded me of Michael because Michael was also not just a classical dancer and had trained in and loved so many styles,” Fushille said. “I’ve wanted our dancers to bring contemporary work into their classical training, to blend (ballet) with that fluidity. Osnel’s work on them is going to impact them in everything they dance.”
After two weeks with Smuin finishing his commission, Delgado will soon be off to New York, where Malpaso is about to dance works by the legendary Swedish choreographer Mats Ek alongside works by au courant American and Canadian choreographers Robyn Mineko Williams and Aszure Barton at the Joyce. But he’s departing San Francisco with nothing but appreciation for the Smuin dancers’ eagerness to channel his influence.
“They have soul,” he said. “They’re trying to reach people with not just their bodies, but their whole experience.”