Moving freely in the U.S.
“The arts, sports and medicine.” Cuban-born San Francisco dancer Ramón Ramos Alayo enumerates his countrymen’s three obsessions. He believes that those areas will continue to fascinate, despite the political and social changes that will inevitably follow the warming of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States. In fact, none of the Cuban emigre dancers interviewed for this series believes that dance will suffer in this new era. But the art will change, and everyone wonders how.
There are two matters on which all seem to agree: The training, whether at the Ballet Nacional de Cuba or any number of contemporary dance academies in the country, is superb; and the Cuban dance culture, in both its performative and its educational guises, must be maintained in the new era.
The Ballet Nacional is respected as much for the quality of its dancers as it is for its history. Early in the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro persuaded ballerina Alicia Alonso to abandon her international career and return to her native Havana to direct a dance school, which evolved into the government-financed Ballet Nacional. Now 93 and blind, Alonso is still the iron-willed power behind the organization.
Phenomenal results
The results of her tenure have been phenomenal. Regardless of how they arrived in this country, Cuban-trained dancers have profoundly influenced the face of American ballet. The current San Francisco Ballet roster boasts four principal dancers from Cuba — Lorena Feijoo, Joan Boada, Carlos Quenedit and Taras Domitro — and Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson says he would hire more if the need and opportunity arose.
“Their training,” Tomasson says, “is very solid in the classical idiom. But stylistically, everything for them is new and different. Here they need to adjust, to make decisions for themselves. Dance has changed a lot in the last 30 or 40 years.”
Tomasson alludes to the restricted repertoire performed by dancers at the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, where isolation from modern trends has generated a kind of provincialism. In some sense, the ballet world has passed Cuba by. And the most adventurous of the emigres will survive best.
“Joan danced with Le Jeune Ballet de France, and Lorena went to the Joffrey Ballet, and they used that opportunity to try different approaches. It was an entirely new ballgame,” Tomasson says. Domitro came here almost directly from Cuba with his National Ballet School training intact.
“Taras was used to dancing only one way, so anything different
could be a struggle for him,” says Tomasson. “It took him a while to find his way.”
The hope that the rapprochement will, in some manner, aerate the Cuban ballet repertoire occupies the mind of José Manuel Carreño, who, since 2013, has been the artistic director of Ballet San Jose. He even talks of touring his South Bay company to Havana one day soon.
Amazing improvement
“There have already been a lot of changes since (President) Obama’s announcement,” Carreño says. “I feel an amazing improvement is coming, which so many of us have been waiting for. Changes in the dance world will spread to other areas, like Cuban music. I hope that someday soon Cuban dancers will be free to go everywhere.”
That has been Carreño’s good fortune. Like his Cuban contemporary Carlos Acosta, he has been permitted to travel at will throughout the ballet world. After winning major ballet competitions in 1987 and 1990, Alonso decided that Carreño would be an ideal poster boy for the Cuban ballet’s training regime.
Carreño did not disappoint. After stints at the English National Ballet and the Royal Ballet, he served as a principal at American Ballet Theatre for 16 years, retiring in 2011. Carreño is now an Amer- ican citizen, but he uses his Cuban passport on his annual visits to see his family in Havana.
Ask Carreño whether he believes foreign influence will dilute Cuban culture, and he replies: “People tell me that I don’t talk or act like a Cuban. Maybe because I feel enriched by every company I have danced with. To have danced with them all is to have learned about style, life and people.”
Other Cuban dancers have not been as fortunate as Carreño. Because her family is still there, Feijoo did not defect. Instead, she emigrated in 1991 and arrived in San Francisco in 1999. A door closed after her departure; Alonso told her that she could return to the country but would never be allowed to perform at the Ballet Nacional.
She was of two minds. “The training was wonderful, and the preparation was extensive,” Feijoo says. “By the time they let you dance Giselle, you knew everything about the role.” But she does not regret the experience she acquired by emigrating.
And although she remains devoted to Cuban culture, she welcomes the new era.
“The country needs it so much,” Feijoo says. “It will be very rough for some of the people who live there and are accustomed to a certain way of doing things.”
Her one worry is that the Cuban culture will disappear in a wave of “Hard Rock Cafes and Starbucks.”
Boada’s and Quenedit’s departures from Cuba were different. Both defected when the Ballet Nacional was on tour in Mexico City, Boada in 1994 and Quenedit in 2009. When Boada asked to dance with Le Jeune Ballet, Alonso told him that he had nothing to learn abroad in France.
“She was wrong,” he says. “After all, she hired Europeans to make the school what it is.”
Boada, who joined San Francisco Ballet in 1999, can go to Cuba on his French passport, but he doubts that he will dance there again.
“My best years are behind me,” he says, “and I’m not Nureyev.”
Promoting Cuban culture
It’s a different story with Alayo, who founded the CubaCaribe Festival and, in 2002, his own dance company. More than a choreographer, he holds master’s degrees in contemporary and folkloric dance and dance education from Havana’s National School of Art. Because the authorities regard his work as promoting Cuban culture, he is permitted to travel to Cuba, which he does once a year with his dance company.
As far as it affects his work, Alayo feels that the restoration of diplomatic relations does not herald significant improvements.
“Raúl Castro will not let anything change much, and I don’t see anybody with a different mentality succeeding him in two years,” Alayo says. “Everything will still be controlled by the government. I could not open a private dance school there.”
Yet Alayo maintains hope for the future.
“I wish that the Cuban people will be permitted to lead their lives. I wish that people will be paid a fair salary, in American dollars. I wish the government would open the channels of communication with the world, especially the Internet,” he says. “If I could have had the freedom to travel, I never would have left.”