Cuban Ballet. Octavio Roca. Layton UT: Gibbs Smith, 2010
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210 Book Reviews Cuban Ballet. Octavio Roca. Layton UT: Gibbs Smith, 2010. 240 pp. (Cloth US$ 40.00) In 1981, Walter Terry published Alicia and her Ballet Nacional de Cuba, a valuable chronicle of the career of Alicia Alonso and the cultivation of bal- let in her country since the 1930s. Now Octavio Roca updates the literature in English about the Cuban ballet, revisiting its history and covering more recent developments. He addresses the flourishing of male dancing in Cuba in the last twenty-five years, which has produced international stars such as Carlos Acosta and José Carreño. He also writes extensively about the trans- national face of the Cuban ballet today. A plethora of dancers, like Acosta and Carreño, have left the island since the 1990s to headline troupes rang- ing from the Royal Ballet (London) to the American Ballet Theatre (New York). In particular, Roca highlights the success stories of the sisters Lorena and Lorna Feijóo, first-rank dancers of the San Francisco and Boston Bal- lets respectively. A Cuban exile himself, Roca relates these migration tales with patriotic pride, adopting the Cuban diaspora’s familiar self-narrative of triumphs and exceptionalism. Although the tone can be overtly celebra- tory, in stressing how the island’s dancers are major players in international ballet circuits, he contributes to a discussion of the global character of con- temporary ballet, showing how international commingling has become the norm in most ensembles, with Asians, Europeans, Latinos, and North Americans working together. Roca also documents how the migration of dancers from Cuba has helped turn Miami into a vibrant city for ballet. The book complements histories written on the island, where commen- tators such as Pedro Simón and Miguel Cabrera have made indispensable contributions to the study of the Cuban ballet, but from official perspec- tives that glorify Alonso and her company, the Ballet Nacional de Cuba (BNC) (Rey & Simón 1996, Cabrera 1998). In political terms, these authors underline the Cuban government’s important support of ballet and, for the most part, are silent about the mass of Cuban dancers working abroad and deemed defectors. Roca, too, praises the many achievements of Alonso and the BNC, but he also indicates that the dance form faces stagnation on the island due to the local economic conditions, lack of freedom, and brain drain, as well as Alonso’s refusal to step down as the troupe’s director, though she is ninety years old. While acknowledging that state support has been essential to the growth of ballet in Cuba, Roca exposes problematic © 2013 Lester Tomé DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340036 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Book Reviews 211 aspects of the relationship between ballet and the Revolution: members of Alonso’s family were persecuted and even executed by Castro’s regime; dancers were marginalized or dismissed on the basis of their religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and political views; and defectors were banned from dancing again in Havana. In Roca’s view, Alonso adjusted to Cuban politics to foster her own enterprise of developing ballet locally—serving as a cultural ambassador of the Revolution, yet rescuing persecuted gay dancers from prison. He does not pass conclusive political judgment on her, adducing that she will be remembered as an artist, not as a player in local politics. Roca, a dance critic for several American newspapers, most notably the San Francisco Chronicle, has followed the international trajectories of Alonso, the BNC, and the many Cuban dancers working in U.S. ensembles. Additionally, he studied the Cuban ballet in situ during frequent trips to Havana and interviewed Alonso, as well as her relatives and other Cuban dancers, several times. These sources often reveal details not published anywhere else, ranging from anecdotes about the Alonso family to stories about Cuban politics. Unfortunately, not all the information in the book is documented in detail. For example, while there is no doubt that homo- sexuals and religious people were repressed in Cuba during the 1960s and 1970s, it is unclear whose testimony Roca cites when he indicates that within the BNC male dancers were pressured to marry by the age of twenty-five (to deflect any suspicions of homosexuality) and that religious students in the National School of Ballet were dismissed (p. 122). Perhaps Roca chose to protect the identity of his sources, but no notes about it appear in the text. In a substantial foreword, Alonso summarizes key aspects of the Cuban ballet’s philosophy—ideas that she has previously discussed in numerous articles in Spanish (Alonso 2004). Her essay, posing the question of what makes the Cuban ballet Cuban, exemplifies the way these dancers articu- late a national identity in their performance style and training methods but also in discourse, through systematic analysis of their distinctive features. Such concerns about a Cuban aesthetics reflect the deep nationalism that defines the island’s artistic production (Tomé 2011). In a second foreword, Mikhail Baryshnikov writes about the excellence of Cuban dancers, con- firming their high status on international stages. Indeed, far from occu- pying a position in the periphery, the Cuban ballet has, more often than not, been on a par with the Russian, European, and North American ballet .