A ballet to Connect with Everyone

Puerto Rican choreographer Eric Rivera, who was for years a prominent figure of the New York Hispanic Ballet, is right now in Cuba, putting together a play with the Camagüey Contemporary Ballet to be premiered in the group's next season. And the sessions, says the artist, are being very enriching.

Rivera has been inspired by the singular "dance" of flocks of birds, group dynamics that generate a strange beauty, to recreate that impulse in a dance group. There’s no title yet, because the creator usually waits for the work to be finished to name it.

What exists is a pattern of movement that seduces the very young dancers of the cast.

This is the second collaboration of the choreographer, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, with the company from Camagüey directed by Lisandra Gómez de la Torre. In 2019, just before the pause imposed by the pandemic, he put together the solo Por el tiempo. He has now returned accompanied by his assistant and student Sophia Berger, who is integrated into a process that is much like a workshop.

Rivera's ballet will pay tribute to a huge theme: freedom, assumed as a collective construction. It will be a work to connect his interpreters in a changing, seductive framework.

The cast dancers are excited. Not even the intense heat of these days takes away their energy. For the director, contact with other ways of doing and understanding dance is essential. It's about not wallowing in a comfort zone. It's about exploring new paths... and that always involves risk. But also a possibility, an opportunity for beauty.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff