Carlos Acosta’s Carmen
Sadler’s Wells Theatre July 2024
What happens to dancers when their bodies or temperaments tell them it’s time to move on? Many walk away from the theatre and never return. I know someone who completed a business degree, another who opened a flower shop, others who trained in psychotherapy and physiotherapy. One dancer started designing hats. Another weaves baskets.
You hear more about those who don’t leave the field, especially the artists who win or inherit the director’s role in a well-known company. Without making headlines, some performers begin teaching dance at home or abroad, if they haven’t done so previously. Some teach the works they know inside out, from either performing them or notating them, passing them on to another generation with authority. A few dancers create new choreography; fewer still create new troupes.
When Carlos Acosta retired from the Royal Ballet in 2015, he had been dancing for 33 years, and many viewers hoped he would never stop. But even then it was obvious that he had more in mind than the next performance. He had already written a novel and an autobiography. He had choreographed Tocororo: A Cuban Tale, which featured young artists from Cuba’s contemporary, ballet and folkloric companies. He had made dances for the musical Guys and Dolls and staged a new version of Don Quixote for the Royal Ballet.
His farewell to that company came in the form of a one-act production of Carmen, which despite his universal popularity and the emotional high of the occasion, received a polite but less than enthusiastic critical response. Now he has revised it, expanding it into a two-act work about 100 minutes long.
For the young dancers in Acosta Danza, the troupe he established in Cuba in 2014, the ballet provides an attractive showcase for their talent and careful training. Pouncing eagerly on the opportunity, they poured their energy into a steady stream of dizzying turns and split jumps, spicing them with little drama but plenty of attitude. Acosta has reduced the immortal opera to the lusty characters Carmen, Don José and Escamillo, focusing on their seductions as their tangled passions blow hot and cold from moment to moment. Splendid in the title role and as Don José, Laura Rodriguez and Alejandro Silva could easily command far more sophisticated choreography, as their credits indicate they do regularly, and their colleagues looked well prepared and avid for greater challenges than this generic gypsy romp.
Acosta appeared among them—how’s that for a box-office draw?—portraying The Bull, who, he says, “is the master of ceremonies. He pulls the strings and controls everyone’s future.” He might have been describing himself, not actually dancing at 51 but still an inspiration for his charges and a potent model of artistry for the audience.
As a performer, Acosta unfailingly displayed a prince’s noble bearing, a charismatic presence, and the gleaming technique of a master athlete. In 2020, he became the director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, which he still leads; a year later, responding to the pandemic’s crippling effect on live performances, he presented his dancers by realizing the company’s first digital commission.
Having established the Acosta Dance Foundation in Cuba in 2011 to promote public education and knowledge of the arts, he has developed it through Acosta Danza and the Acosta Danza Academy in Havana, which encourages the involvement and training of children in a free, three-year course. Extending the Foundation’s reach still further, he has opened the Acosta Dance Centre in east London, where it aims to engage the local community in dance by welcoming professionals and amateurs equally.
Attaching his name to every aspect of his far-flung ambition may be a sensible business choice rather than the expression of personal hubris. Who cares if his choreography is mediocre? Is anyone else in dance doing as much for it?
See acostadancecentre.com for scheduled performances and classes in London.