There are proposals for all types of audiences at the 24th International Festival of Ballet from Havana as usual. There are many performances with the classics that people can enjoy, by companies invited from abroad. Besides that, there are other combined programs where you can either find a pas de deux at the style of Petipa, or a chorographic experiment.
The best of these events is the conjugation of schools with different ways of dancing. The contrast becomes dialogue, good for everybody either dancers, choreographers, critics and of course the audience, which thanks to the festival, we can measure some of the expressions of the contemporaneous dance.
The company from the American Company Pontus Lidberg, leaded by the Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg presented a really beautiful program at Cavarrubias Hall at the National Theater.
Dancers are excellent. Some of the performances are aimed to recreate the peculiar style of the choreographer, full of dynamics alternated between soloists, duets and corps of ballet. But in Faune there is something more which is very evident: something rewritten inspired from La siesta de un fauno, which becomes a speech on identity marks, the expression on what it is different.
The cycles of the choreography perfectly match with the magnificent music by Claude Debussy. References to the choreography of Nijinsky are more than a simple homage.
It is also good El Beso, choreography by Gustavo Ramirez for Hispanic Ballet from New York. It was the closing of the performances of that company at Mella Theater. It has a lot of humor, without rejecting certain sarcasm; dancers explore all the implications of kissing with traditional Spanish operetta.
It is interesting, the way to break the gestures of certain sentimental and passionate dance, absolutely mine with current events.
In the rest of the program, there highlighted the vocation to show the Latin American legacy in the American culture, either showing poetical creation of the music and life of Celia Cruz (Azuka, with choreography by Eduardo Vilaro (or diving into the turbulences and deepness of the relationships between couples (Sortijas, duet of Cayenato Soto).
From Annabel Lopez Ochoa, a choreography well known in Cuba for her job in Celeste for our National Ballet could be appreciated in Sombrerismo, inspired by the work of the Belgium painter Rene Magritte. Lopez Ochoa, does not stay in the referent and convinces with the strength from some of the metaphors, that dancer that cannot stand the heavy hats of his partners: an image that suggests a lot, and the evolutions of the masculine corps of ballet.
