For Lauren Cleto and Yuris Nórido,
friends and teachers
My trips to the ballet are counted. Let’s not go any further because there is no further. During the last Ballet Festival of Havana – at the height of the assistance-I went to see Coppelia, Swan Lake and took a look at the dramatic presentation of José Manuel Carreño and some figures of U.S. ballet companies.
It was my baptism of fire, but that’s one of the things art does. It accommodates even inept people. It doesn’t matter that you know nothing, or that you don’t understand, or that you go over and over again to the theatres to pinpoint the dramatic turn, the dramaturgical course of scenes.
I was impressed with the basics, I mean, the lights, the scenery, the elegance of the dancer, the music suggestion. I was impressed by these elementary minutiae, the devastating minutiae of discovery. A man who discovers an art is, at least for a few minutes, just like the man who discovers a world, ot the man who discovered a fossil or a chemical.
No one has gotten there before him. Nobody has clashed with that void of ways, with that pagan cathedral of acts and intermediate and complicated variations of stories strayed into villages and castles that no longer exist but in the repertoire of successful companies, in the feet and gestures of stylized athletes.
The sense of discovery is the first feeling, the same for everyone. You should forget the reviews you have read, the assessments you’ve heard, you should banish even your own vast ignorance and get into the art ring knowing you are a welter versus a middleweight, and not only that, but is better to lose, if it’s possible by KO. A person who beats art becomes specialist, just a tautological talk of your own recycled one.
As we move into knowledge, the dilemma of survival takes on another hue. Not to dry, not to die, that experience doesn’t squander the sense of wonder, or fascination with the impossible. This means one thing and that thing says: to some extent, in vulgar nuisance. What bothers me about ballet is its audience.
I guess there are wise fans, people who clap at the unconscionable turn, who vibrate with superhuman speed, with the demonstration of physical strength, but also do so with the subtle gesture, with the brittle and fragile ballerinas, with signs and silences visibly intentional, of brutal and effective emotional burdens.
I don’t like, for example, Viengsay Valdes. I don’t like her aggressive torso, her forest robustness, what can I say. However, none of this is a problem. All initiations are happy, but traumatic too. One begins to know the true and the false from the earliest ages. You should know that good and evil are inseparable, and that art and its surroundings, at any time, regardless of its expression, is fauna full of phonies.
Ballet reminded me other beginnings. The first time I went to a stadium, the first touch of saints, and the first and last woman (there are not two women alike) -their swan bodies worn by desire -even the first guard duty during the military service and the first death close.
The ballet audience applauds when they suppose they have to, that has reminded me other endings. The bad press. People of Havana who wear a scarf in November. The magician Rothbart.
Author
Carlos M. Álvarez
