Luminato :: Lizt Alfonso’s Danza Cuba
Singer Omara Portuondo, of Buena Vista Social Club fame, rehearses with members of Ballet Lizt Alfonso. She plays an older version of Vida, who is portrayed by performers of different ages as her story — reminiscent of Lizt Alfonzo’s life and Cuba’s history — unfolds.
Lizt Alfonso’s Danza Cuba prepares for their dance musical Vida for Toronto
May 24, 2007 04:30 AM
Susan Walker
DANCE WRITER
HAVANA– On a Monday afternoon in the third floor studio of Ballet Lizt Alfonso, the dancers – six girls, 15 women and Vadim, a male guest artist – gather for a run-through of Act I of Vida. Omara Portuondo (of Buena Vista Social Club) is at the side of the room going over lines from a revised script.
Although they don’t show it, this is a tense moment for Lizt Alfonso and her Canadian co-director Kelly Robinson, because much refining is still to be done before the company flies to Toronto.
Along the back wall of the studio the musicians take their places: company composer Denis Javier Peralta Amigó on keyboards, a woman cellist, a violinist, a trumpeter, and three percussionists on bongos, djembes, caixa and drum sets.
A rough journey to dance fame
The show is the co-creation of Lizt Alfonso; her world manager, Torontonian Peter Sever; and Robinson’s employer, Mirvish Productions. It is a first for Toronto and for Ballet Lizt Alfonso: a Cuban-Canadian co-production of an elaborate dance musical.
But Danza Cuba, as Ballet Lizt Alfonso is known in North America, is comfortable on the big stage. They sold out two performances in Havana’s 5,000-seat Karl Marx theatre for their 15th anniversary show last October. On their first U.S. tour in 2001, they played to 3,000 people in New York City’s Summerstage festival in Central Park.
Alfonso’s shows, including Alas (Wings), Elementos (Elements) and Fuerza y Compas (Strength and Beat), are dance and music of a kind no one else creates: a seamless fusion of Spanish classical dance, ballet, flamenco, Afro-Cuban dance and Cuban social dance – mamba, rumba and cha-cha-cha.
Vida is the story of one woman’s life, told from her vantage point near the end of her life to her granddaughter Alma. It is a parallel to Lizt Alfonso’s own life and alludes to Cuba’s 20th-century history. It’s “an ode to life,” says Robinson. (“Vida” is Spanish for “life.”)
Sever’s journey with the company began in the fall of 2005 when a friend in Texas handed him a videotape and suggested he might want to represent Lizt Alfonso.
“On Christmas day in Toronto,” Sever recalls, “I took a look at the video.” The show amazed him. “I had never seen anything like it.”
Sever flew to Havana in the early part of 2006 to discuss with Alfonso the idea of representing her company outside of Cuba and mounting a major show in Canada.
“I said, `Yes, a musical. Okay. It’s perfect,’” Alfonso recalls. “It’s a big difference, and it’s a challenge: right away we started to work on it.”
Sever took his idea to David Mirvish and a deal was soon struck for a show. Veronica Tennant, former National Ballet prima ballerina, joined the project to make a TV documentary. She’s now talking about a dance film of Vida.
Everything moved very quickly, as the show’s creative team gathered in Havana in January.
“It was like combustion,” says Tennant.
Behind the scenes of a theatrical joint venture, things do not often go smoothly, at least at the outset. But with Vida, the exception became the rule.
“By the end of the first day, we were actively talking about the creation of the show,” says Robinson of his initial meeting with Alfonso, her husband and company manager Juan Carlos Coello. They all agreed they didn’t want a show that would be folkloric, or a floor show like Tropicana or a revue. “We wanted it to be something to touch an audience emotionally.”
A theme developed as Robinson gathered existing choreography from Lizt’s shows and shaped it to a story of survival in difficult times.
“I think it’s easy to come to that knowing just a little bit about Cuba, and seeing Lizt, seeing the girls, the work, seeing what she’s doing.” In the first act of Vida, a teenage dancer joins a revolutionary movement and meets the man she will marry.
Omara, a family friend of Lizt’s, was the natural choice to play an old Vida, who tells the story of her life to her granddaughter Alma. Omara tells her own story through Pedro, son of a company administrator. She has been a singer all her life, she says, and made her first trip to the U.S. with a musical group in 1951. “The invitation to join this project came as a great pleasure to me. I have a lot of admiration for Lizt’s work,” she says.
Alfonso felt there should be two women to play the grandmother, so she chose Ele Valdez, lead singer in the Cuban group Sintesis, as the second one. “Because I thought they should be very different and give a different feeling to the part,” says the choreographer.
Tennant runs her video camera as the rehearsal begins. Grandma Vida enters on a cane, and approaches Alma, a role taken by a student in the Lizt Alfonso school. She is Yaraidy Fernández Ojito, an engaging child of 10, with a dynamite dance style. Camila Sánchez Pérez plays Vida 1, the youngest. A couple of years ago, this child had a major heart operation done by a team of Cuban and American doctors. Lizt was the first person after her parents admitted to see the girl.
Omara does her narration in Spanish, but she’ll record the English text so it is heard in the theatre as a voice-over. “In Cuba, like many other places, the old leave the young a gift, a token some might call an amulet …” Later she also sings, on the remembered occasion of a birthday party, with the dancers surrounding her and applauding.
The scenes in Act I include a charming piece adapted for students in the Lizt Alfonso school, from an earlier Alfonso show. Three girls play Spanish mistresses in flamenco shoes, dancing classical Spanish style. Three more are servants. They wear flat wooden sandals and beat out Afro-Cuban rhythms.
Death, played by Maysabel Pintado Santidriàn, is a captivating character who doubles as a punishing military general and will eventually take Vida to the next world.
Yudisley Martínez Ventura, a striking young dancer, is Vida II, in her 20s when she dances a pas de deux with her lover, a rebel. Vadim Larramendi Paz a guest artist, dances this role.
The rehearsal goes well.
Robinson gets to talk first, as the dancers and musicians gather in a semi-circle, with Amigó translating for him. Robinson is explaining that there are going to be a lot of little changes to be made, and in some cases, unmade: “An audience makes meaning out of everything, music words, movement, expression, things that you have in your hands. How you stitch it together is very important.” Later, Robinson, a ballet dancer turned opera and theatre director, says the language difference is not all that the co-directors face. “We’re working with different performance lexicons,” he says, meaning dance, spoken theatre, song and music.
It has been a difficult session, but the smile hasn’t left Lizt’s face as she speaks in rapid-fire Spanish to the dancers. They seem like her daughters. Nor is she fazed by the work that must be accomplished before Vida hits the stage in Toronto next week.
