CARLOS ACOSTA The Reluctant Dancer MARGARET WILLIS 2 If God gives you a gift, it doesn’t matter what colour you are. That gift is within you, and nothing, nothing need stop it. You must always follow your dream. Carlos Acosta Your destiny is in your hands – you cannot forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children. It also means pushing our children to set their sights a little bit higher. Barack Obama Dancers are the athletes of God. Albert Einstein 3 Contents Title Page Epigraph Introduction 1 From Barrio Bajo to Ballet Barre 2 Discipline, Distractions and Disasters Spell Truancy 3 Expulsion and Epiphany 4 The Realisation of His Potential – and Its Rewards 5 The Italian Job and European Acclaim 6 Jeté-ing Off to London 7 Back Where He Started – and Beyond 8 Houston: We Have Lift-off 9 Slow Beginnings Lead to Speedy Progress 10 A Cuban Tale for Everyone 11 The Role He Was Born to Dance 12 Sharing His Present with His Past Finale – But Not the Final Curtain Biography 4 Acknowledgements Plates About the Author Copyright 5 Introduction SILENCE DESCENDS ON THE AUDITORIUM as the conductor raises his baton and the music begins. The curtains draw back to reveal a brilliantly lit stage, the audience anticipates. Suddenly from the wings, the Cuban ‘missile’ strikes, shooting across the open space in awe-inspiring, powerful airborne leaps which defy gravity and human force, while his fast spinning turns seem to bore holes in the flooring. Carlos Acosta, the once reluctant dancer, has arrived. The spine-tickling thrill felt throughout the auditorium is evident as breaths are sucked in with excited admiration, not just because of the new tricks the muscular dancer has perfected, but because everything he does stems from a pure classical ballet technique – and from the heart. To most people, ballet is a mysterious art. Unlike theatre, film, music and opera, little is known of it outside its hallowed studios in the real world. A predicted description of ballet from the man-on-the-street would be that the women dance on their tippy-toes while the men wear tights. Unlike the pop star world, ballet dancers and company seasons come and go unnoticed with little fanfare – only their aficionados are switched into the art’s remarkable powers to thrill. Just occasionally do ballet exponents become household names – and for obvious reasons. Rudolf Nureyev, the Russian Tatar, was the first in recent years to hit the world’s headlines when, in 1961, he made his dramatic leap for 6 freedom to the West from the Kirov Ballet bringing with him a new style of powerful, macho male dancing. Then thirteen years later came Mikhail Baryshnikov, also an escapee from the stifling Soviet system. With his boyish charm and softer bravura technique, he presented a different brand of male dancing to the world’s stages, and later reached a wider audience with appearances in films and television series. And then there is Carlos Acosta, born in Cuba, with a background of deprivation, physical punishment and reluctance, who has nonetheless become a legend in his own lifetime. From the barrios of a Havana slum and a history of young delinquency which brought him several times in line with the law, he now conquers the world’s stages performing before royalty and rulers, and winning hearts and plaudits for his exacting technique and the breathtaking, fearless risks he takes in his dancing. Along with his exceptional physical talents, his friendliness, interest in others and good manners have resulted in him being sought out for chat shows and interviews, while there is always a throng of loyal fans outside stage doors waiting for him after a performance. He has known as many lows as highs in his lifetime and yet, pushed on by a paternal force, he learned dutifully to develop and share his talent with the world. For Carlos, who remains one of the nicest and most humble stars in today’s artistic galaxy, it has been an unbelievable but wonderfully enriching journey, and his life offers a story of hope to all. 7 1 From Barrio Bajo to Ballet Barre ‘Tethering the little slum ruffian’ IT WAS GOOD that he was bad. If he had not been a rebel, a delinquent skipping school to breakdance and play football, he might have ended up as a truck driver like his father, or become one of the many jobless young men, lounging around on street corners. Or even worse, he could have landed in prison. But Carlos Acosta had a destiny to play out, one that would take him from anonymity, loneliness and the sultry heat of his home slums, to adulation, fame and fortune on the stages of the world where he has become one of the most famous male dancers of his generation. However, it was because of his constant truancy that his father sent him to be disciplined in the ballet studio. And the rest, as they say, is history, even though the decision didn’t produce an immediate magical about-face as happens in many of the fairy-tale ballets that Carlos has since danced. He had to learn to love classical ballet – and that took many, many years of hard work and resistance to its tough demanding disciplines. He would have preferred to take the easy route and just be ‘normal’. Carlos Junior Acosta Quesada was born on 2 June 1973 in Los Pinos, in the Arroyo Naranjo district of La Habana, on the sleeping crocodile-shaped Caribbean island of Cuba. Today, parts of Los Pinos boast a burgeoning tourist area with modern villas overlooking white sands and turquoise seas. 8 But for Carlos in the 1970s, it was a grim place to be brought up in. Los Pinos, typical of so many other neighbourhoods in Cuba, was drab and dusty with crumbling brickwork falling onto cracked and broken paths. Women, intent on finding food for their families, scurried along these litter-filled pavements trying to ignore the rotting smells from overflowing garbage bins which attracted not only clouds of flies but feral cats and mangy, homeless dogs. Ramshackle trucks rattled noisily along the pot-holed roads, kicking up dust and throwing out fumes. Despite their perilous appearance, these metal monstrosities were beloved by their owners and tenderly repaired with parts from old, rusty Russian machines left during the friendlier days between these two once-strong bastions of communism. ‘They would also be repaired with bent coat hangers, bits of wire, TV remote control parts – whatever you could lay your hands on,’ laughed Carlos. ‘It was a wonder that they moved at all, but to own one, was to have status.’ The Acosta family lived on the upper floor of a two-storey rural wooden house in one of these bustling dusty streets – Naranjito 971 e/Fernandez, Castro y Avenida los Pinos. There were six apartments in this old building, three down and three up. The Acostas reached their apartment via a rusting metal staircase that branched off to the left and to the right near the top. ‘We were in the middle apartment,’ he said, ‘and we usually went up the left side and passed the window of our neighbours. Everyone knew what was going on with us. I was really happy here as a kid despite us not having anything. I miss the atmosphere even today.’ The Acostas had no running water and Carlos relates in his autobiography that every drop had to be carried in by hand and up the stairs, while the walls throughout the apartment had cracks that let in the daylight 9 and overwhelming heat, and gave cosy shelter to the many bugs.* The challenge to keep everything clean in the dust and the heat was depressing, yet Cuban women are house-proud, none more so than Carlos’ mother who daily would sweep away the dirt and grime and go on her knees to scrub the rough floors. There was no privacy in these shanty-like homes – everyone knew everybody’s business, and every sound of neighbours’ activities and conflicts, together with the noises of gear-grinding trucks and spluttering motorbikes on the road outside had to be tolerated day and night. Sleeping accommodation for the family of five in the Acosta household was equally bleak. When he was three years old, Carlos’ parents divorced but, due to the economic situation, his father continued to live in the same house. ‘He didn’t talk much. He was very strict and hard on us so it was a traumatic childhood for me and my sisters,’ he remembered. With just two rooms and the large, ungainly pieces of battered furniture that inhabited the meagre space, the family had to be divided at bedtime: his father slept on a mat in the living room while the two sisters slept squashed together in an antiquated double bed whose springs poked through the well-worn mattress. Little Carlos slept with his mother in a single bed that was shoved up against the wall. But like young children, he was happy there: ‘It was home. We had two rabbits that just hopped around the apartment. I am not sure if they were bought for me as pets, or to multiply for food, but they were part of my young life,’ he recalled years later in London. ‘Up on the roof I kept pigeons. I raised them and bonded with them. You have to put them in wire pens so that they can see the sky around them and get to know their home territory. And I would fly them. You know that pigeons try to pull other pigeons down into their area, so if one landed on my roof and I caught it, then it 10