WHY ARE
THERE SO MANY GREAT ARGENTINE DANCERS?
A ballet at the Teatro Colón, in Buenos Aires,
Buenos Aires is a curious city. It gets under your skin, with
its mix of grandeur and grubbiness, its French-style apartment buildings and
majestic trees looming somewhat wearily over perennially torn-up sidewalks.
Fancy dogs, promenaded by harried dog-walkers, rub shoulders with extreme
poverty and constant, low-grade protests. (We Argentines are champion
complainers.) The city is suffused with a powerful sense of its former
importance—Argentina was once one of wealthiest countries in the world—even as
it recedes resentfully into the distant past. One of the most common questions
a visitor is asked is, “What do people say about us in New
York/London/wherever”? To which one must almost apologetically reply, not very
much at all.
It is also a place that has produced, and still produces—despite
hard times, relative isolation, and constant political upheaval—people of great
talent and accomplishment, in just about every field. Around the world, there
are prominent Argentine doctors, scientists, international-law experts,
conductors, musicians. This is especially striking in the world of dance.
Ballet was more or less a twentieth-century import to Argentina, brought by
travelling troupes like Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but its roots have dug
their way down deep. At one time, the country could attract the best dancers
and choreographers to work at its elegant and vast Teatro Colón, a seigneurial
pile that fills an entire city block off of the Avenida 9 de Julio. George
Balanchine and Bronislava Nijinska both worked there; Anna Pavlova and Rudolf
Nureyev danced there. European teachers flocked there in the early twentieth
century, fleeing revolutions and war.
Those teachers trained the next generation of teachers, and so
on to this day. Argentina still produces a disproportionate number of topnotch
dancers, who make their way into the world’s great ballet companies. Over the
years, these have included Julio Bocca, Maximiliano Guerra, Paloma Herrera,
Ludmila Pagliero, Herman Cornejo, and Marianela Núñez. And these are just the
stars. But Argentina’s pride is also Argentina’s loss. As the extraordinary
virtuoso Cornejo recently told me during a brief trip home to Buenos Aires,
“All the artists we admired trained here and then left the country. In your
mind it was: school is here, but for a career you need to leave.”
Cornejo, who was in town for a ballet gala at the Teatro Colón,
recalled how he got hooked on ballet as a young kid. He doesn’t come from a
family of dancers or musicians. His father was in the military. When he was
five or six, his mother gave him a video of the Soviet virtuoso Vladimir
Vasiliev, a huge star, dancing “Spartacus.” He was so impressed by that video
that she bought him a ticket to see the ballet—a testosterone-driven tale about
a Roman slave rebellion—live at the Luna Park arena downtown, danced by one of
the big Argentine stars of the eighties, Maximiliano Guerra. (His career was
mostly in Europe, but he came back for occasional tours.) After that, Cornejo
decided that he, too, wanted to be a dancer. He studied at the Colón’s feeder
school, the Instituto Superior de Arte, as well as privately, won some big
international prizes, and then left Argentina definitively to join American
Ballet Theatre. He’s now in his mid-thirties, and one of the world’s finest
male dancers, but hadn’t been invited to dance at the Colón until recently.
“We’ve had a great career in many people’s eyes,” he told a local reporter,
“but it took some effort to get back to Argentina.” He’ll be dancing at the
Colón again in November, this time in a three-act ballet, “La Bayadère,” with
another Argentine dancer, Ludmila Pagliero. Pagliero is an étoile (the top rank) at the Paris Opera
Ballet.
One of his classmates from ballet school, Marianela Núñez, also
danced at the gala. She, too, left Argentina at a young age (fourteen). At
sixteen, she joined the Royal Ballet, in London, where she is now a principal
dancer. Like Cornejo, she has impeccable technique, sensitive musicality, and a
kind of luminous modesty onstage. She doesn’t grab your attention by force as
some ballerinas do; instead, she draws you in quietly, by the very naturalness
with which she does things. Then—pow!—she’ll just fly into the air. Her
transitions, especially, are seamless. It’s stealth technique, not fireworks. A
few days after the gala, she performed the role of Tatiana in “Onegin,” a
ballet based on Pushkin’s novel in verse about a bored dandy who falls
desperately in love with a girl he once humiliated. It was her first
full-length ballet with the company.
It was a radiant, fine-spun performance. During the curtain
calls, Núñez peered up at the top ring of the enormous house with tear-rimmed
eyes. “A ton of moments from my childhood flashed by in that moment,” she told
me the next day at the elegant Petit Colón café next door, after rushing in
from a rehearsal. (Her mother used to wait for her there after ballet class.)
Her parents had been at the performance. Her father was overcome. “He just
stood there, in a corner, waiting quietly while people came to congratulate me.
And then, pam!, he just started to
cry.”
What was it like to dance with her old classmates from ballet
school, many of whom are still in the company? “Everyone kept saying, ‘It’s
like you never left,’ ” she told me. The man who brought her back is the
recently named director of the company: Maximiliano Guerra, come full circle.
In a weird way, Cornejo, Núñez, Pagliero, and Guerra are all bound together,
like family. And why are there so many great Argentine dancers, I asked? “Well,
first of all we have a great base. There are great teachers here. But, you
know, nothing is served to us on a platter. We’ve all had to scramble for
things, from a very young age. It’s something we have inside of us, and when we
go abroad, people notice.”
The ovation after “Onegin” went on for a long time. After a few
minutes, I began to look around. To my left, standing in the aisle, I saw a
young dancer in the company, Macarena Giménez. I’d seen her rehearse a
different ballet last year—yet another promising Argentine dancer with
beautiful technique and seemingly limitless potential. As she stood there,
barely clapping, as if in a trance, I could see her cheek was bathed with
tears. She will dance the second female role in “La Bayadère,” Gamzatti, with
Cornejo this November. Then, who knows?
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