What comes next for Cuban modern dance?

What comes next for Cuban modern dance?

For a dance-cognizant visitor from the United States, watching a class
in técnica cubana is heady: very familiar and then suddenly not, as
torsos contracting in Graham style turn ultra-sinuous, ultra-African, or
a standard ballet exercise swerves into the gestures of an Afro-Cuban god.
BRIAN SEIBERT
New York Times News Service

HAVANA
Idania Wambrug teaches dance in a capacious, brick-vaulted studio with
so much light streaming down from high windows that it almost feels like
an outdoor pavilion. It's the same studio where she was a student in the
1960s, and over the years, all that natural light has been helpful when
the electricity has gone out.

The studio is in the National School of Dance here in Havana, part of
the National Arts Schools, an avant-garde architectural project
conceived not long after the 1959 Cuban Revolution but never completed.
What Wambrug teaches comes from that time as well. With a mandate from
the revolutionary government, the Cuban choreographer Ramiro Guerra
created "técnica cubana," a hybrid of American modern dance — the
language of Martha Graham, José Limón and others, which Guerra had
studied in the United States — with ballet and Cuban tradition, both
Spanish and African.

For a dance-cognizant visitor from the United States, watching a class
in técnica cubana is heady: very familiar and then suddenly not, as
torsos contracting in Graham style turn ultra-sinuous, ultra-African, or
a standard ballet exercise swerves into the gestures of an Afro-Cuban
god. Yet the alloy is coherent and potent. It's a great,
under-recognized invention that develops dancers of extraordinary
strength with the agility to manage all of its wild twists.

Still, técnica cubana can seem rather like the 1950s Chevys famously
still cruising Cuba's streets: gorgeous, miraculously maintained, way
behind the times. (Cuban ballet, better known and also better funded by
the state, is even more trapped in amber.) Information about dance, in
the form of videos or visiting choreographers, is easier than
automobiles to get through a blockade, but traces of developments in
American modern dance from the last 40 or 50 years, though present, are
scarce here.

Like everything else in Cuban-American relations, that may now be
changing. And the dance-maker taking the most advantage of the changes
is Osnel Delgado, Wambrug's son.

Delgado studied tuition-free at the National School of Dance, as did
both his parents and as do most professional modern dancers in Cuba,
unless they train at one of the island's excellent ballet schools. After
he graduated, he joined Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, the country's
foremost modern dance troupe, founded by Guerra in 1959. In 2011, the
company made its first U.S. tour. Delgado's performance at the Joyce
Theater in New York was a moment of triumph, but at 25 he had already
decided to break off on his own as a choreographer. Everyone told him he
was making the wrong move.

On Tuesday, he returns to the Joyce – for the third time in three
consecutive years – with his own company. It's called Malpaso, which in
Spanish means "misstep." His wrong move came at the right time.

"What Obama and our president just did, Malpaso has been doing for a
while," Delgado said after a recent rehearsal in Havana, just a month
after President Barack Obama's visit. He and Malpaso were back home
after a busy spring touring the United States. Soon they head north
again for more tour dates, a schedule no other Cuban troupe can match.

When Delgado first formed Malpaso with Fernando Saez, a friend and a
savvy administrator with the Ludwig Foundation, they applied for
government funding. When they were told it was unavailable, they went
ahead anyway, becoming one of very few Cuban troupes not reliant on
government money.

When the Joyce sent the renowned American choreographer Ronald K. Brown
to Havana in 2013 to create a work for a Cuban troupe of his choosing,
Brown picked Malpaso. The piece he made shared a program with one by
Delgado at the fledgling company's U.S. debut, at the Joyce the
following year.

The year after that, Malpaso returned to the Joyce with a new dance by
another prominent American choreographer, Trey McIntyre. Now it's
bringing "Bad Winter," an older work that the smitten McIntyre has
presented to Malpaso as a gift.

Partly a fluke of timing, this engagement with the United States has
become central to Malpaso's mission, setting it apart from other Cuban
troupes, of which there are a surprising number. It offers American
presenters something Cuban along with something more familiar, as
Delgado and his dancers absorb American influences.

For decades, the main outside influence on Cuban dance has come from
Europe. That can be seen in DanzAbierta, a troupe that will make its New
York debut on May 14, following Malpaso in the Joyce's 12-day festival
of Cuban dance. Marianela Boan, who founded DanzAbierta in 1988 and who
has since moved to the Dominican Republic, believed in what she called
"contaminated dance" and drew heavily on European dance-theater, like
that of Pina Bausch.

Her aesthetic has been furthered by Susana Pous, a Spanish choreographer
who has directed DanzAbierta since 2008. Her works, collaborations with
Cuban visual artists and musicians, are, she said, about "the problems
of Cuban life, more than just pretty dance." Many of Pous' pieces – like
"Showroom," which DanzAbierta is bringing to the Joyce – address and
resist exotic stereotypes of Cuban dancers still promulgated by tacky
tourist cabarets.

An ambivalence about Cuba's dance heritage is expressed more intensely
in the choreography of George Céspedes, one of Danza Contemporánea's
most prolific homegrown talents. His recent pieces seem to tamp down on
the dancers' virtuosity and sensual pleasure, to be about a Cuban body
struggling within a dour, oppressive conceptualism.

In person, he's refreshingly frank. While many Cubans respond to
questions about how Cuba is changing by rolling their eyes, Céspedes
says that maybe his grandchildren will see change. Having started an
independent company three years ago, he's trying to get back into the
government-funded system. It's too hard, he says, to survive outside.

Delgado, whose company is surviving and who may find a different path
forward through American models, is somewhat concerned about Cuban dance
losing its identity – buffeted by European influences and now by the
coming flood of tourist money and what kind of dance that might
encourage. He can sound a lot like a modern-dance choreographer in New
York (who would envy his free dance education and health care): pining
for a bigger audience, longer runs and a permanent space to work. He
wishes he had a place to host a choreographic lab, "which we really need
in Cuba," he said.

The most recent policy changes announced by the Obama administration
mean that presenters in the United States, previously restricted to
providing only travel expenses and per diems, will soon be allowed to
pay Cuban companies like Malpaso to perform. But this improvement has
already generated controversy about how the Cuban government may tax
that income – one of many examples of the bewildering legal and economic
limbo in which a group like Malpaso has to operate.

Meanwhile, Delgado is doing what modern choreographers do, trying to
develop his own way of saying what he has to say. A ballet class is part
of Malpaso's everyday training, but not any classes in técnica cubana.
"That technique is our base, my blood" he said, "but we don't dance like
that."

Recently, many of the Malpaso dancers gathered in a restaurant that one
of them had opened, a source of income that would have been unlikely
before restrictions loosened in 2010. With them was Isidro Rolando, a
man with five decades of experience as a dancer, teacher and
choreographer for Danza Contemporánea. He taught Delgado's parents. He
recalled the importance of the company in establishing the legitimacy of
Afro-Cuban culture. "We created things of value," he said ruefully, "but
they will probably disappear."

Delgado rose from his chair and physically quoted a bit of Rolando's
choreography. His attitude was respectful and affectionate, but it
didn't contradict what Rolando had said.

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