My Growing Relationship with Cuban Dance Culture

My association with the Cuban culture and their approach to life began in the political jungle that can be present in academia.  I needed help and was sent to a senior member of the faculty, Dr. Angelina Pedroso. She was a dark exotic looking woman, who spoke English with a heavy Spanish accent, and she was Cuban.  What I remember most of her was her musical pronunciation of English.  “Y” became “J”, “R” rolled off and spun over her tongue, and “don't” became “dun”.   I can still hear her voice in my head and I remember her constant kindness. Her guidance and advice in my early career, stuck with me, “You are a white woman in America with red hair, you can do anything you want to do. Don’t let these people bully you”. I felt supported by the advice from that point, on.

While still at the university, I met my next Cuban colleague and friend, who spoke English with that same musical tone, making my flat Midwestern dialect seem crude.  One of my dancers brought Victor Alexander Ramirez Pages to my dance rehearsal at the Ruth Page Center.  She said he had newly arrived from Cuba and was hoping to continue his dancing.  I sent him to the corner of the studio and said that I would consider him as an apprentice.  

I watched him dance for an hour. Embarrassed, I asked, “Who are you?”  Victor, as it turned out, was a polished, seasoned, and very talented dancer.  Between my bad Spanish, his worse English, some ballet French and lots of sign language, I learned he had been a principal dancer for the prominent Danza Contemporánea de Cuba from 1992 to 2002, performing internationally.  Victor became a well know artist in Chicago, working with the Lyric Opera, Hubbard Street Dance and happily with my company, Concert Dance Inc. (CDI) for ten years.

Because of Victor, many Cuban dancers came to see our work and showed interest in working with us.  Today, seven out of eleven dancers in the CDI Company are Cuban.  

When Victor, finally retired from dancing, The Ruth Page Foundation, of which I am Artistic Director, invited Victor to become the Director of its School of Dance.  Its founders, Ruth Page and Larry Long had passed away and the school needed leadership. Choosing a new Director was not going to be easy.  Everyone associated with the school had an opinion on who should be chosen. Here I was again, that feeling of having to make the correct political decision.  My confidence wavered until I recalled Dr. Pedroso's advice. I considered the choices and landed on Victor. He is an international artist, he is modest about his accomplishments and I knew he would be in the trenches with us, doing the necessary hard work of building the school.  Above all he cares about people, the teachers, the students, co-workers and he believes deeply in the transformative power of our shared art form: dance.

How lucky we were to have Victor accept the position.  What was an informal stream of highly trained Cuban dancers coming to the Ruth Page Center, became a formal relationship with the The Cuban National Ballet School (Escuela Nacional de Ballet de Cuba Fernando Alonso.)  With a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and donations from generous individuals our first Cuban exchange took place in 2015. Our Cuba Exchange was the starting point for what is now an active International Summer Dance Program with students from many states in the U.S. and from students abroad like Mexico, Israel, Spain, Italy and as far away as Japan. 

One of our promising Ruth Page students has been drafted into the Cuban National Ballet Company and one of the teachers from the Cuban National School is in residence at Ruth Page School for the fall semester. Catherine Conley, a student at the Ruth Page School, caught the eye of the Cuban dance school director.  She was impressed when Catherine had to learn two dances in less than a week, than performed them beautifully.  First, Catherine was invited to be a student with the Cuban school, then an apprentice with the Cuban National Ballet Company, and now a company member; an amazing journey for such a young artist. 

This journey and relationship  with the Cuban dance community has been one filled with amazement and excitement, and I cannot wait to see were it takes us.