Posted on Thu, Feb. 21, 2008
BY JORDAN LEVIN
jlevin@MiamiHerald.com
For Taras Domitro, Hayna Gutierrez and Miguel Angel Blanco, everything
has changed -- except ballet.
Since the three leading dancers with the National Ballet of Cuba made
their late night dash for the United States last December, driving
across the border from Ontario, Canada, to upstate New York, their lives
have contracted around their art. Where they once lived in Havana,
rehearsing at the National Ballet's stately but dilapidated center and
touring Europe, Asia, and Latin America, they are now sequestered in the
heart of suburban South Florida.
They live with Domitro's mother Magaly Suarez in her Pompano Beach home
and rehearse every night in her studio, The Art of Classical Ballet, in
the Storage Mart strip mall six blocks away.
It is a strange but safe launching pad before they vault onto the next
stage -- as soloists with the San Francisco Ballet. For now, however,
they are focused on their U.S. debut this weekend at the Fillmore Miami
Beach in Swan Lake with the Cuban Classical Ballet of Miami, a small
South Florida company co-directed by Suarez and Pedro Pablo Peña.
Their future is wide open, but right now all they've got is this small
space for the moves they've practiced all their lives.
As Blanco lifts Gutierrez in rehearsal one night last week, her head
comes perilously close to the ceiling. Gutierrez holds an arabesque, and
holds it, and holds it, perfectly poised, staring out the studio window
at the black, wet parking lot. Flying across the room, Blanco must keep
changing direction so he won't run into a wall.
As Domitro, who hovers like a humming bird when he leaps, takes his
turn, legs split a horizon-spanning 180 degrees, Suarez lets herself
beam with motherly pride. But otherwise, she is all business. ''Go up!''
she keeps exhorting them. ``Up! Up!''
Gutierrez, wrestling with a wicked sequence of steps in the Black Swan
pas de deux, drops over, panting. ''The thing is, it's just a lot of
steps very fast,'' she says, her soft voice pleading. ``Very, very fast.''
Fast is how their lives have changed.
Gutierrez and her two companions got their new positions in San
Francisco through luck, talent, and the tight network of ballet exilio.
A few days after the three principal dancers defected last Dec. 17,
Ricardo Bustamente, ballet master for the San Francisco Ballet, saw a TV
news story on the trio. Bustamente reached out to Jorge Esquivel, a
longtime teacher at the San Francisco troupe who also is from Cuba and
performed with Alicia Alonso, the National Ballet of Cuba's founder and
director, to find these new arrivals.
Esquivel called Suarez, a ballet mistress who taught at the National
Ballet of Cuba for 19 years before defecting nine years ago, and asked
if she knew the Cuban dancers who had just arrived in South Florida.
''He didn't know they were living with me!'' Suarez recalls with a
laugh. A few days later the trio flew out to San Francisco, where they
auditioned over Christmas and were all offered contracts as soloists.
''For my part I was afraid,'' says Gutierrez, who at 26 is in the prime
of a ballerina's short career. The San Francisco Ballet's director,
Helgi Tomasson, was initially only interested in Blanco, because he
needed a tall man, but Suarez insisted that all of them audition.
''Really, I was very lucky, and I'm very happy,'' Gutierrez says.
She has reason to be. The San Francisco Ballet is highly respected and
well funded, with a repertory that extends from the classics to new
works by top choreographers. Two other Cuban dancers, Lorena Feijoo and
Joan Boada, have had stellar careers there.
''We can't ask for more,'' says Blanco, 25, tall and confident. His
father is a theater director in Cuba and his two brothers live in Spain
and Italy. ``It's not like other dancers who get here and have to wait
for months without work. That's why we're patient.''
Until their work permits arrive, they will need patience. ''We're still
in transit,'' Blanco says. ``We still really don't know how things are
here, what life is like for you.''
They don't have cars or drivers licenses or money. They are on an island
of familiarity in a sea of strangeness, taking ballet class and
rehearsing a ballet they've all danced before with an exacting and
familiar teacher -- all trained with Suarez before she left Cuba.
''It's a continuation of the same life,'' Gutierrez says. ``We haven't
stopped, we kept rehearsing, it's the same schedule we had in Cuba.''
But it is not really the same.
''I feel completely different,'' says Domitro, the youngest at 21. Where
Blanco likes salsa and opera, and Gutierrez is partial to pop, Domitro
has punk and heavy metal on the iPod he bought abroad. His arms are
tattooed with dragons and stars. Like his companions, he made the
decision to defect suddenly, just after a matinee performance in Ontario
where his mother had traveled to see her son, the three of them knocking
on her hotel room door late at night to ask for help.
In Cuba Domitro had a good salary, the equivalent of $50 a month, and he
had traveled the world without thinking of defecting. But next door to
the United States, he suddenly longed to leave.
''I don't know how to explain,'' he says, shaking his head. ``I . . . I
just didn't want to go back to Cuba, back to the same thing, to the
monotony.''
Suarez, 45, whom generations of dancers have nicknamed ''Mamacha,'' left
her son behind when he was 13, when both were in Colombia, she to teach
and he to perform in a Nutcracker.
''It was hard, but we were both thinking of the future, not thinking
with our hearts,'' Suarez says. ''I knew the talent Taras had then'' and
she knew he would get terrific training in Cuba and live safely with his
father and grandmother.
Suarez, sitting in a Red Lobster restaurant after rehearsal, says she
has gotten used to plenty, to comfort, to saying what she wants. She
doesn't think her son or his friends realize how much their world has
changed. Nor do they realize what they've left behind. ''They know
they've left,'' Suarez says. 'But they do this thing I used to do --
every day I'd tell myself `don't be sad, everything will be fine, just a
couple more years.' ''
Right now these dancers are anything but sad.
Gutierrez longs to dance Who Cares? -- George Balanchine's jaunty,
jazzy, ultra-American ballet set to George Gershwin songs that she saw
on DVD in Cuba. ''I love it. It's gorgeous,'' she says, eyes glowing.
Domitro was very impressed with San Francisco Ballet's luxurious studios
-- in Cuba, dancers would hurt themselves on years-old holes in the
National Ballet's floors -- and the Golden Gate Bridge that he had only
seen in American movies. He wants to show off his athleticism in Don
Quixote, try new ballets. And to dance in Miami, where they've heard the
audience is just as passionate as the audience in Cuba.
''We're nuts to dance in Miami,'' Domitro says. ``I feel so excited, not
at all nervous. We're used to dancing. We've danced all over the world.''
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