Carlos Acosta stands in the bright Cuban light. A straggle of goats wanders past ruminatively; a peacock cries from the nearby trees. “Imagine it,” he says, flinging his arms wide. “You just put yourself into that day in the future when we have a big opening with kids from all around the world.”
The subject of this vivid dream is the building lying in ruins around him. This is the National Art Schools of Havana, a gleam in the eye of Fidel Castro in 1961, in the optimistic early years of the Cuban revolution, abandoned to the elements as economic privation and different visions of the future took their hold.
For Acosta, returning to his homeland after decades away, the symbolism is perfect. Castro intended that the site, with its five separate schools for five branches of the arts, including dance, would be a beacon both of Cuba’s artistic excellence and its passion for social justice. Impoverished children from every country would be invited to study there.
Now Acosta wants to restore the dance school and revive that vision. “Cuba gave me an amazing chance to turn myself into the dancer I am for free, and it is a philosophy I want to pass on,” he explains. “I believe in free education and free opportunities. You are not going to solve the worst problems here, but at least we do something. Maybe we can find the next Baryshnikov, the next Nureyev. Then they will find other projects that will give other people a chance.”
***
From the viewpoint of Britain, where Acosta has spent the past 17 years as a principal with the Royal Ballet, it has been hard to understand his obsession with raising the $20m it will take to make this aspiration a reality. But standing next to him, as he shows the site to members of his American foundation and guests from London’s Sadler’s Wells, it becomes clear.
This really is a magical place. Built of rich red brick and terracotta tiles, in a western suburb of Havana, the complex was meant to be an artistic paradise. The architects imagined soaring Moorish arches and huge windows that faced out on to lush vegetation, with water running into fountains and perfect ventilation to catch the breeze.
Acosta would like to start by raising $1m so that he can restore a dance studio and dressing rooms, and start to hold events on the site, “then we are in business”. The plan to rebuild the school is an integral part of why Acosta has returned to Cuba, where he has been based since January. He plans in future to divide his time between Havana and England.
He has got a lot on his plate. Not only is he campaigning to restore the school, he has also formed a new dance company – Acosta Danza – recruiting 25 dancers, half of whom are classically trained and half of whom have a contemporary dance background. He wants, eventually, to incorporate flamenco and hip hop into their technique “to create a company that doesn’t quite look like any other company in the world”. He plans to tour the group internationally but also to bring the best of the world to Cuba in terms of standards of production and choreography.
The company has been founded at a time of great change. Contradictions are everywhere. At the lavishly restored Gran Teatro Alicia Alonso, a wonderful white marble wedding cake of tiers and sweeping staircases, loo roll is still handed out by the sheet. Food from the lunch tables of a buffet at the British embassy is – in what I am told is a very Cuban gesture – packed up to share with dancers in rehearsal.
Small private businesses are springing up, bringing restoration and new life to rundown areas; government-backed efforts to preserve their country’s history and architecture are producing results. But while the rise in tourism – apparently heading for a record 5 million this year – puts lobster pizza on the menu of a restaurant serving visitors, many residents still rely on a ration book for their daily fare.
Acosta notes the mood. “Four years ago you were not allowed to buy a house,” he says. “If you go back six years people didn’t have mobile phones. A few years ago you ate chicken, rice, black beans. Now you can find zucchini, broccoli, rucola – rucola! In Cuba! That is unheard of.”
His wife Charlotte and their four-year-old daughter Aila have found it harder to acclimatise, both to the heat and to new patterns of eating. “They are vegetarian and there still isn’t the variation of vegetables that you get in London. We are very spoilt in London because you find everything off season. So it is a lot of adapting for them to do.”
Acosta’s own relationship with Cuba – and with his parents, now both dead – forms the refrain of his autobiography No Way Home, one of the best books about the lure of dance ever written, charting his rise from grinding poverty to world stardom, yet punctuated by an almost unbearable sense of dislocation, torn as he is between his longing to be with his family and the desire to leave Havana and become the best dancer he can possibly be.
I am struck by its sadness when I reread it on the plane. “You live your life in phases,” he explains. “I was very lost and lonely. I am coming back here from the perspective of a completely new man. I have done all these things and discovered things about myself that I didn’t know.”
Acosta has a warmth and generosity in his conversation and demeanour that sweep you along in the passion of his beliefs: “One day we are all going to die. But I don’t want to die with all the knowledge and all the things that I have gathered throughout the years. I want to pass it on. I’d like to inspire dancers and for people to see the beauty of what we do. I thought this could be very rewarding. And it is.”
We are talking in the building the Ministry of Culture has provided as a base for Acosta Danza – an old domestic appliances store, in central Havana, with high ceilings and huge windows in square metal frames, giving a view on to a wide street. When the dancers rehearse, crowds gather outside taking pictures.
Their first performances at the Gran Teatro have generated similar levels of interest, with tickets sold at two sets of prices: expensive for visitors, cheaper for Cubans. On the first night, they perform Acosta’s version of Carmen with notable attack, as well as intriguing contemporary work by Cuban choreographers. The reception is ecstatic and at curtain call, Acosta, dressed in a white suit, runs down from the circle on to the stage, punching the air like a boxer. He looks as if he wants to start dancing, though, at 42, his days of soaring pyrotechnics are coming to an end.
He does, however, dance in the classical selection, but he is saying farewell to such performances, moulding himself into the role of director. “I will dance for a little bit longer, but I don’t know how long,” he tells me. “I want my work and these dancers to be the stars. I would like this company to last. It’s a legacy.”
***
Dance is everywhere in Cuba, in nightclubs, in restaurants, on stages. Choreographer Nilda Guerra, founder and director of Ballet Rakatan, a company that has vividly conjured Cuban dance on worldwide tours of the hugely successful show Havana Rakatan, attributes its popularity, in part, to the social interaction that lies behind it. “In Cuba, if you are a good dancer then you can find the best men in the party,” she says, smiling, a flower bobbing in her hair. “Cubans have an admiration for people who dance really nicely. Everyone pays attention.”
She remembers Acosta as a teenager who could salsa. “Normally classical dancers weren’t allowed to move like that. The teachers didn’t want them to. But Carlos was special.”
Guerra, like Acosta, is a beneficiary of an education system that nurtures aspiring dancers from an early age. The products of this detailed discipline provided both by the National Ballet School, where Acosta trained, and by many other institutions teaching ballet, contemporary and folk dance are everywhere to be seen. Yet the education system doesn’t always make it easy for them. Guerra’s company is in the middle of creating Vamos Cuba!, a dance celebration of the island’s life and culture, that will be the summer show at Sadler’s Wells, which is also a co-producer. An illustration of the local difficulties came when Guerra had to reclaim wood from the streets for sets and improvise costumes, in order to present a workshop version to international guests.
A similar combination of world-beating talent and economic privation is on display at the headquarters of the National Ballet of Cuba. Floors are cracked; masonry crumbling. Yet this is the flagship of Cuban dance, founded by the formidable Alicia Alonso at the height of the revolution, when she proved that ballet really could be for everyone. I meet her briefly. She is 94, and blind, but still charismatic, her makeup perfect, her imperious face radiant. She sits as her dancers go through a pas de deux from Swan Lake, moving her ring-bedecked hands in time to the music.
The teaching emphasises precision and artistry, and you can see those qualities in action in the rehearsal taking place upstairs, where Viengsay Valdés, Acosta’s regular partner in guest appearances abroad, is putting a new young Siegfried (Patricio Revé) through his paces. As she runs along the lines of swans, their arms immaculately in line, the depth of her belief brings a lump to the throat. For a moment in that studio, with dancers in practice dress and tinny pre-recorded music, this great dancer creates the image of a swan princess running away from her captor. She has reproduced that run literally thousands of times, yet it still seems to matter. “I don’t want to have a bad rehearsal,” she explains, as she finishes. “So it is better to give everything so you have the role inside you like a companion.”
Valdés has guested abroad with many companies, but she has chosen to stay in Cuba, despite a more restricted repertory and old-fashioned productions. She is glad to have Acosta back, with his new ideas about dance. “It’s good the Cuban audience can have him,” she says. That same lack of resentment at Acosta’s return has been shown by Danza Contemporánea de Cuba – whose dancers performed with him when he made his Cuban tale Tocororo. I watch them rehearsing in an upstairs studio near to the famous mural of Che Guevara on the Plaza de la Revolución. Heavy tropical leaves press against the open windows through which the dancers scramble to make their entrances in pieces by Cuban choreographer George Céspedes and the British dance-maker Theo Clinkard.
The company, like the National Ballet of Cuba and the feeder schools, may have lost some of its dancers to Acosta Danza, but it is clear that there is talent and commitment aplenty. What it has been hungry for, according to David Codling, regional arts director at the British Council, is innovation. “People in the performing arts told us that the openings and possibilities for new choreography are very limited.” So for the past four years, the British Council has organised exchange programmes for choreographers. It is also running writers’ schemes in association with the Royal Court in London, and giving opportunities to young Cuban film-makers.
“There’s a great sense of pride in many things Cuba has achieved,” Codling observes of the four years he has been visiting the country. “There’s also frustration at some of the results of isolation. For the past 50 years, Cuba has had a resonance in the world at large that is out of all proportion to its size. People here are aware that it has to bear this freight of expectations, hopes, ideals, memory, nostalgia, from all sorts of different quarters and that’s quite a lot for this island to cope with.”
The desire to change but not to lose values that have sustained the country, the wealth of talent and the thirst for originality, form the context into which Acosta has launched his company. Goodwill runs high. “He’s just a national hero,” one fan told me. “People never come back here. But he has.”
But the weight of expectation is equally heavy. He knows that “to arrive and break the ice is one thing, but to maintain it is difficult. It is a big responsibility to keep up the standard I already have – and the level of production is all going to be of that standard. Everything is hard. You just need to bang it, and bang it and bang it” – he acts out the act of pushing a door hard. “I am up for that. And I think the government is up for that as well, and everybody. But you have to do it the Cuban way, you have to be persistent.”
His long-term vision is to help to redefine Cuba as an artistic destination: people may come for the beaches, the buildings and the colourful old American cars, but he wants them to stay to discover a rich cultural life. His company aims to be part of that – as does the restored school.
“I am too idealistic,” he says, with a grin. “But everything I dream of, I achieve. If I wasn’t idealistic, I wasn’t going to be me, ever. I would have been the kid who died in Los Pinos. You always have to have curiosity and dream of a possibility that is beyond your reach in order to excel. It took me 10 years to write a book, but I finished. This project might take me 50, but I’ll finish. I’ll be 90 saying, we did it. Finally.”
• Vamos Cuba! is at Sadler’s Wells, London EC1R, from 26 July to 21 August. Carlos Acosta: The Classical Farewell is at the the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7, from 3-7 October. Acosta Danza will tour next year.
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