Carlos Acosta shared last night with the Peralada audience a show that arises from one of those turning points that occur in the life of a dancer. It was the year 2010 when his mother transferred. And the then still star of the Royal Ballet in London, the first black Romeo accepted by well-off European society, only knew classical ballet. It was what he had been educated in his native Cuba, as recounted in the film Yuli that Icíar Bollaín directed in 2019.
But before the death of her mother, a door was opened towards contemporary dance with which she could express what she felt, that introspection about childhood, her family, her relationship with her mother and that life as an artist far from theirs...
At his magnificent 49 years, Acosta danced –and how!– accompanied by a dancer from his company, Laura Rodríguez, in a show that has allowed him to work with different choreographers and that still keeps him on stage. And his personal dedication reached the public on the Costa Brava in a profound, emotional way. It was the last of the 18 shows in this 36th edition of the festival, which has registered an 85% occupancy rate.
A series of solos and two steps followed one another on this On before, which precisely started with the piece by Will Tuckett that bears the same title. It was followed by an interesting solo by Miguel Altunaga, Memoria, and Sirin by Yury Yanowsky, to end the first part with the magnetic and well-known Two by Russell Maliphant.
In this story about a doomed relationship between a man and a woman, various musical materials follow one another, from Händel to the Cuban contemporary Omar Puente. And it culminated in a big way with O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen, with the direct participation of the choir O Vos Omnes, who lent their twenty singers as actors throughout the show: passers-by from a lurking beyond.
Dance lovers were able to discover in the second part a work by the British of Danish origin Kim Brandstrup, and a new duo that Acosta has incorporated for this recovery of the show: Nosotros, by Cuban Raúl Reinoso.
In the final stretch of the show, Acosta appeared a few years younger dancing in a large-scale projection with his former partner at the Royal Ballet, Zenaida Yanowsky. This Spanish woman of French origin, wife of the baritone Simon Keenlyside, hung up her shoes in 2017. And as Acosta himself indicates, without her “it wasn't the same”.
With his already mature body instrument, Acosta achieves in this reissue of the show a stylistic syncretism that is the maraca of the house. When in 2015 he set up Acosta Danza, in Cuba there was only the National Ballet oriented to classical and Cuban Contemporary Dance. He stood in the middle to host all dances without distinction: from contemporary he opened up to ballet, flamenco, Afro-Cuban... Yesterday the best version of this syncretism of race and rhythm that is Cuban dance itself could be seen .
