Contemporary Dance in Cuba Now
Abigail Levine

Imagine you are a botanist and you take a trip. As you get to know the place you are visiting, you realize that botany is considered an essential part of national culture and history. Botanists are celebrities on a par with pop singers and movie stars. When you tell people what you do, they ask you well-informed questions and tell you about their favorite plant species. Most astoundingly, you discover that when people are feeling most jubilant, want most to feel the power of life and human company, they study plants.

This is what it feels like to arrive in Cuba as a dancer. Dance has essential meaning in Cuba, as a part of popular culture, social, religious and family life, and as a historically significant art form. Dance is everywhere and everyone dances. I returned to Cuba in the fall of 2001, four years after taking an Afro-Cuban dance workshop in Santiago de Cuba in 1997. I have lived and worked in Havana as a dancer and choreographer for the last two years. Taking professional classes and choreographing work for different dance companies, has given me a way to explore a contemporary dance culture that blends European, African and North American traditions purposefully, and to see dance institutions that are supported and run in a way fundamentally different from the ones I work with in New York.

In certain ways, contemporary dance occupies a very difficult position in Cuba. It is sandwiched between more dominant dance forms which means it has to work to carve out a place for itself within Cuba's cultural identity, as well as in the international dance world. In Cuba, ballet, with Alicia Alonso at the helm, reigns supreme. It attracts an audience more diverse and enthusiastic than in almost any other part of the world. Ballet demonstrates Cuba's mastery and love of its European heritage. Afro-Cuban dance is sacred. It binds Cubans to the other major element of their cultural history and makes the link between that history and the popular culture that so dominates Cuban social life. Contemporary dance has a little ballet and a little Afro-Cuban dance, but serves neither social purpose. It is not a preservationist art form nor a popular, communal activity.

There are other social forces that affect contemporary dance in Cuba too. Tourism and the consequent commercialism seem to demand a very limited, nostalgic show of Cuban culture — think "Buena Vista Social Club" and the Tropicana Night Club. To earn much-needed hard currency, highly trained and creative musicians and dancers are often reduced to performing the same decades-old repertory night after night. Although there are some artists who make their living on the concert stage alone, this pressure for artistic stasis takes its toll on the entire artistic community. Artists also understand that when performing abroad, they are representing not just their company or band, but all of Cuba, which adds to the pressure to present art that celebrates Cuba's unique traditions and culture. In contrast, the movement of international contemporary dance, especially American and European, tends towards rejection of tradition and blending of cultural symbols, often obscuring them beyond recognition.

Surprisingly, Cuban modern dance is only 44 years old. It was born with the company Danza Contemporanea de Cuba (DCC), founded by a group of American and Cuban dancers, including Lorna Burdsall and Ramiro Guerra, who developed a movement technique based on a combination of American modern dance, Afro-Cuban movements and ballet. DCC has grown into an internationally acclaimed repertory company, recognized most for its dancers'technical virtuosity and sensual, exuberant performance. The company has a diverse and impressive body of work created by choreographers from all over the world. The works by Cuban choreographers from the 60s and 70s demonstrate the unique contribution the Cuban form of modern dance brought to the development of the art form (although it has not received the exposure it deserves). Unfortunately, the recent work by Cuban choreographers for this company lags noticeably behind that of their predecessors and betrays the intense training and extraordinary talent of its dancers. It tends to present the dancers with physical challenges but not performance or conceptual ones. DCC director Miguel Iglesias talks of the need to preserve the unique qualities and identity of Cuban modern dance as it is challenged by a generation of dancers who want to experiment and fill their work with the dance they see from other parts of the world.

Partly in reaction to the dominating aesthetic and presence of DCC in Cuba, a number of DCC alums left to form smaller, more experimental, companies. Each has shot out on a different path, filling a niche for dancers who do not fit the DCC mold, and for audiences who want to see dance stretched in different directions. Among the most established of these younger groups are the companies Narciso Medina, Rosario Cardenas, Marianela Boan (DanzAbierta), and Isabel Bustos (Retazos).

DanzAbierta is the company that has created its own artistic identity most successfully. Boan has established a distinctive theater-dance style with her company that has won her substantial national and international acclaim. She has translated into movement the double-edged humor that Cubans exploit so well, at once celebrating and critiquing Cuba and the Cuban way of life. Boan's choice of dancers and her ways of working with them also distance her from her predecessors. She pulls dancers mostly from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), the college-level arts institute. This means her dancers are, on average, four years older than dancers entering other companies, and they have studied composition, dance history, and subjects outside of dance. Boan draws upon her dancers' wider breadth of experience and skills, asking them to improvise, create phrases of movement, to speak and sing, to add layers to her choreography. This is a model much closer to ones used by experimental contemporary dance companies in the U.S., but Boan seems careful to always address on some level themes that are uniquely Cuban.

Boan's company and those of her contemporaries are now about a decade old. There is already another generation of dance-makers emerging in Cuba, drawing from the widened pool of influences to push the boundaries of dance in Cuba. The ISA seems to play an instrumental role in the growth of this latest experimentation. The university level dance program is less than 10 years old. It is aimed at training dance educators and theoreticians. However, many young dancers who do want performance careers, perhaps of a different sort than past generations, are attending the ISA to develop their ideas and connect with their peers.

Each year Isabel Bustos' company Retazos and the city historian Eusebio Leal host the International Festival of Dance in Urban Landscapes (Encuentro Internacional de Danza en Paisajes Urbanos). Performances take place during Easter week in the plazas, streets and museums of La Habana Vieja. It is one of the few opportunities for non company-affiliated choreographers to present their work for an audience. Students from the ISA take this opportunity to heart, studying the quirks of the different performance spaces available to them and making dances, of varying levels of sophistication and success, that converse with the buildings and shops and streets around them. Two young women dance in yellow rain gear, only to have water drench them from a balcony being cleaned above their heads. A young woman shows her strength to two macho men by first lifting a cardboard dumbbell and then trying her luck at a stone pillar holding up the building behind her. Sometimes they are one-joke dances, but they are playing with ideas and techniques that are not being seen on the big stages in Havana.

Proyecto Danza Voluminosa, directed by Juan Miguel Mas, has been pushing the definition of dance in Cuba for the past six years. As the company name suggests, Danza Voluminosa was created to explore the unique movement and artistic potential of larger bodies. The dancers refer to themselves simply as los gordos (fat people). Mas received a scholarship from Alicia Alonso to pursue study in ballet and has performed character roles with Danza Contemporanea de Cuba. He has many friends in the dance establishment, but has had to struggle to insert an experimental dance company, made up of mostly nonprofessional dancers, into Cuba's dance scene. His work is often very minimalist and theatrically based. The company performed an evening-length Phaedra, choreographed by Ramiro Guerra, that combined dance, opera, and theater in a peculiarly humorous and affecting way. The company has received a good deal of media attention nationally and internationally, although mostly as a novelty. Cubans think the idea of fat people doing modern dance is raucously funny, and, much to his credit, Mas acknowledges and toys with his audience' s expectations and prejudices, often winning them over in the process.

Mas looks at Cuban dance today with an intelligent and critical eye. He notes that there is no supported space for experimental work in dance. He points to a time in the early Nineties when there was a flowering of nontraditional dance, supported by various established institutions, such as the Espacio para el riesgo (Space for Risk) at the Casa de Las Américas. This period of experimentation, he says, has disappeared for a variety of reasons. He believes that for dance in Cuba to advance, it is essential to develop training programs for young choreographers and theater spaces that are dedicated to showing new and nontraditional dance. In a 2001 article for the Havana newspaper Juventud Rebelde, Ismael Abelo supports Mas'call, noting, "The Achilles heal of dance in Cuba today is, generally speaking, the choreography."

Dancers within Danza Contemporanea de Cuba are also beginning to create their own work. Mostly in their early twenties, these dancers are successes within the old model of Cuban modern dance but are looking for ways to make their own contributions and statements through dance. George Cespedes, 23, has been making dances since he was a student at the Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA, the National Arts School). His work "Por Favor, No Me Limites" (Please, Don't Hold Me Back) recently won the Ibero-American Choreography Prize and premiered at the 2002 International Ballet Festival in Havana. The short work was danced by four male members of the National Ballet. Cespedes punctuated his fluid and kinetic movement vocabulary with simple yet expressive gestures. The movement most repeated in the dance took place with the men gathered together. Each raised a hand to cover another' s eyes, sometimes pushing them off, sometimes accepting the blindness. Cespedes said that he hoped that the very personal message of this dance would touch the audience in the backs of their minds, affecting them but without their knowing exactly how. He feels that he still has much development to do as a choreographer and, therefore, he is not yet looking for ways in which to establish himself as a choreographer. He feels that one of the greatest disadvantages for artists in Cuba, a lack of information about the art world in other countries, is also a great advantage. It obliges people to dig into themselves and create. When new information becomes available, we truly study it and remember it.

Contemporary dance in Cuba has achieved a great deal in its short history and has the potential to make an important and unique contribution to the world of dance. The dancers that come out of the national dance schools are some of the most talented and well-trained I have ever seen. As professionals, they work committedly and are supported and respected by their government despite financial constraints. Their audience is knowledgeable, and their profession is respected as an essential part of society and culture.

However, the leaders of the major dance institutions (governmental and nongovernmental) are putting tradition, virtuosity and salability first, over experimentation and creative training. The economic brutality of the "Special Period" is still resonant in people's minds, pushing them away from riskier, more draining endeavors. Within this context, a small group of dancers and choreographers in Cuba are working with energy and passion, creating varied and thoughtful work that is both in dialogue with American and European contemporary dance and still uniquely Cuban.

Abigail Levine, a native New Yorker, has created work for the DanceNow NYC Festival, La Guardia High School of Performing Arts, the Manhattan Opera Theater, as well as for swimming pools, street corners, colonial plazas, and La Guardia and Bradley airports. From 2001-2003, Levine lived in Havana, Cuba, where she danced, taught, and created work for Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, the National School of the Arts in Havana, Danza Voluminosa, the Dias de la Danza Festival, and the International Festival of Dance in Urban Landscapes. She has danced with Alan Good, Pat Catterson, Wendy Osserman, and the Denishawn Repertory Dancers and is currently working with renowned Cuban choreographer Marianela Boan.