Ballet Nacional de Cuba

            So Friday night we as a group decided that we were going to go to see the National Cuban Ballet that was performing here in Havana.  One of the girls in our group is researching the difference between ballet and salsa in Cuban culture and we all tagged along so that she wouldn’t have to go by herself.  It was a phenomenal time.  We made a whole night of it so we all got all dressed up and went out to eat dinner at this fancy Chinese restaurant with amazingly cheap prizes.  We rode a surprisingly empty bus downtown and got off and paid half price with our student ids and then the magic started. 

We went around the side of the theater and walked up quite a few flights of stairs (there is a reason the tickets were half off) and stepped out into a different time.  The Gran Teatro de La Habana (The Great Theatre of Havana) officially opened in 1838 while Cuba was still under Spanish colonial rule.  It was torn down in 1914, but a lot of the old moldings, the ceiling, and the seats are originals or replicas in the neo-baroque one that is to the right of the capital now.  As such, this building was an architectural gem that over the years has definitely weathered some storms but retained fabulous lines and shouts echoes of the past.  The ornate sculpture, the giant crest set into the moldings, and the worn velvet seats all spoke of a time that has passed and moved on.

            The actual ballet that we saw was the opening night of “La magia de la danza”, which means “The Magic of the Dance”.  It was a hodgepodge of scenes from lots of famous ballets including Giselle, Swan Lake, and the Nutcracker.  My favorite by far though was the Don Quijote scenes.  Last semester I took a class on Cervantes and we read Don Quijote so I literally jumped out of my seat with excitement when the curtain was raised during the second act.  Alicia Alonso, the founder, director, and choreographer for the National Ballet, did an incredible job of giving tribute to this famous Spanish work.  The two scenes from the book that were incorporated were the marriage of Quiteria and Basilio and when Espada and his lover Mercedes arrive at an inn in Castilla.  By far the girl who danced the part of Quiteria, Viengsay Valdés, was the most amazing ballerina I have ever seen.  Her strongest talent was the ability to balance.  She went up on those point shoes and then was a statue and did not flinch for longer than was humanly possible. It was beautiful.

            While I didn’t see my favorite man from la Mancha, Don Quijote, as we were sprinting towards the bus after the ballet ended, I was struck with how well the ballet had shown the struggle that occurs between being Cuban and being Spanish.  Like I said, this was distinctly old world, from the theater to the dancing itself to the fact that it was mostly foreigners watching.  However, Alicia Alonso did a fabulous job by ending the ballet with an expressly Cuban work that incorporated the work of Louis Moreau Gottschalk who wrote his work solely based on Caribbean culture.  It was beautiful and the audience definitely left knowing that Cuban culture was what was here now and while it respected the old world, it fully embraced their new identity.