Mary Brennan

IT COULD be a pivotal moment in a Hollywood film – perhaps, one day, it will be. Zoom in, for a close-up, and you’ll find a man in jeans and a T-shirt, contemplating a crumbling sprawl of buildings on an abandoned wasteland. These empty ruins on the outskirts of Havana are the unfinished witness to a visionary ambition: a home of the arts where students from all across Cuba, and beyond, could come to train as dancers, actors, musicians, painters, architects. The only talent that has flourished here over decades is Nature’s ability to unstitch bricks and mortar with vegetation.

The man in jeans and T-shirt doesn’t see forlorn hopes and abandoned dreams, however. What he sees is the prospect of new beginnings – and why not. The man is Carlos Acosta, loved and feted the world over as one of the greatest male classical dancers in living memory. Maybe even the greatest, with a portfolio of breathless accolades from the sternest of critics and a global fanbase whose ecstatic responses to his artistry must now be confined to watching DVDs of his performances. Acosta no longer dances those heritage roles.

The tights have been consigned to the laundry-basket of time: after 17 years with the Royal Ballet, Acosta retired from the company in November 2015. He left with a typically flamboyant flourish, alternating the roles of Don Jose and the toreador, Escamillo, in a new version of Carmen that he’d choreographed and directed himself. It meant shouldering the responsibilities for how the production looked and moved onstage while performing at the very heart of it, putting intense pressure on mind as well as his (then 42 year old) body. He has spoken since of the pain that shadowed his onstage athleticism. Damaged knees, even toes, needed operations to keep the spring still present in his steps while cortisone injections allowed him to rise above the pain threshold and perform roles that many younger dancers would find overly taxing. You might assume that Acosta would, thereafter, put his feet up. He has a young family – three little girls with his English wife, Charlotte – and a rural home away from the hub-bub of London. What’s not to relax into, and enjoy?

Acosta, however, already had other plans in mind. Mere months after he had fulfilled all of his classical commitments, Acosta was back home in his beloved Cuba, standing in front of the derelict National Schools of Art, instigated in 1961 by Fidel Castro and his comrade in revolution, Che Guevara but never completed. However in 2010 the Cuban Government officially recognised the fragmentary Arts Schools as important national monuments: Acosta is now on a mission to bring them to life, have them fulfil their original purpose and provide opportunities for the underprivileged youth of Cuba to learn to dance.

For “dance” read “hope” – a word that recurs throughout the recent phone conversation I have with Acosta about the young company he founded soon after his return to Cuba. It’s now touring in the UK, and heading to Edinburgh in early November. The very existence of Acosta Danza sums up much of what drives and pre-occupies this profoundly patriotic man. “I can look back at my own story – and realise how different my life would be without dance,” he says. If that story, which he related in often graphic detail in the autobiographical No Way Home – a Cuban Dancer's Story (2007), is truly a “rags-to-riches’ one, it is also a deeply personal and honest witness to the transformative power of the arts, and of dance especially. “Of course it was tough,” he says, with a glimmer of what you might call a survivor’s chuckle. “But when teachers believed in me, gave me encouragement, they were also giving me hope. They became like a family to me and when I started the auditions for my company, Acosta Danza, that was an important part of what I wanted to bring to everyone there. I wanted them to look beyond that rehearsal room – beyond Havana, beyond Cuba – and look out, to the world that still doesn’t really know much about my country.”

He pauses. He knows what an exotic rarity he was when, aged only 16, he took part in the Prix de Lausanne in 1990. “I was from Cuba, I was black – there was no expectation that I would know any of the European classical ballets, or be able to dance them. I was an outsider.” He won the gold medal at Lausanne, and several other major awards in the course of that same year. Within a 12-month, he had embarked on an international career that, in 1998, saw him join the Royal Ballet. If the rest is now history, it’s a history he hopes will be an inspiration to other Cuban dancers, whatever their chosen style.

“I want them to know what is possible, if you push yourself to achieve. That you can do what you love most, and it – your dance – can take you travelling the world, getting salaries that can allow you to realise hopes and dreams. But I also want them to know the joy of sharing who you are and where you come from with the rest of the world. To say that our country has such a wealth of talent, and we want to surprise them and delight them with it.”

He knows full well, of course, that other kinds of wealth are in shorter supply in Cuba. While he’s looking to re-establish the derelict Arts Complex, his new company is working out of an old domestic appliances store in central Havana, supportively provided by the Ministry of Culture. If it’s a far cry from facilities at the Royal Opera House, Acosta in no way fazed. He’s sourced his all-Cuban troupe of dancers, some classically adept, others with techniques grounded in contemporary training – and if anyone can bring some street style to the mix, that’s well and good. The teenage Acosta was a pretty nifty breakdancer himself. The range of their abilities is showcased in the programme he’s put together for their first tour.

“I wanted to have choreographers that weren’t already well known,” he says. “That way, audiences would get a very fresh, very new experience. We wanted to bring something different to the table, something that had an authentic energy and diversity that is, absolutely, Cuba. The Crossing Over Niagara is, for me, a really strong example of Cuban choreography. It’s a duet from 1987, and it was very avant-garde then but I think it has relevance now. I like it because it is very “bare”. Nowadays everybody tries to be clever with lighting, scenery, effects – but here you have the beginnings, the essence, of contemporary dance where it’s all about the movement and the physicality of the bodies. What you see is the concentration of the dancers, and I like that.”

Belles Lettres by American Justin Peck is in the Debut programme because his work hasn’t so far been seen in the UK. In fact the only name audiences might recognise is Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, whose strange and mysteriously poetic duet Mermaid brings Acosta onstage for his only appearance.

As we chat, two things emerge that are, I think, truly emblematic of who Costa is, at 44. Neither has to do with his celebrity, both are about roots and resolve and priorities. Acosta Danza was due to perform in Cuba when, on September 11, Hurricane Irma struck the island. “That opening weekend for the Old Theatre, there was no power, we couldn’t go on,” he says.”The second weekend, we had got the power on and we danced. We danced for Cuba, for our community, for the good that the arts can bring into peoples lives – because the arts can bring them together, unify their spirit in the time of the crisis.”

While he has been talking, a small voice has occasionally chipped in. It belongs to his five year old daughter Aila who – along with one year old twin girls, Maya and Luna and his wife, Charlotte – have been snuggled up beside him. Whenever possible, they tour with him, and are becoming as much at home in Cuba as in England. Family matters to Acosta, as does his Cuban ancestry and heritage. “I want the girls to know about my country, be as much a part of it as they are of the life we have in Britain. To belong to both cultures, to see all the places we go to with Acosta Danza – I think it will give them wonderful, wonderful memories and that makes me so happy for them.”

Scottish audiences will be able to make their own special memories when Acosta Danza gives two performances in Edinburgh.

Acosta Danza: Debut is at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre next Friday and Saturday. See www.edtheatres.com