Cuban Ballet in Print, a Fascinating Encyclopedia

Cuban Ballet in Print, a Fascinating Encyclopedia Havana, Feb 20. – The history of ballet in Cuba, from its first traces in the late 18th century to date, dances in a book launched here recently, as part of rigorous research, grace and good writing.

The book was presented last weekend at the Dulce María Loynaz Center, during the International Book Fair Cuba 2012, which is now traveling across the country. Hundreds of dance students, critics, journalists, writers and fans of the art attended the launch of the book.

The author of this fascinating adventure, Miguel Cabrera, the historian of the National Ballet of Cuba, directed by prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso, recorded with an accurate pulse the first hints of classical dance in Havana, which was visited by John Guillet, a dance teacher of French or Catalonian origin.

Guillet was the first to establish the rules for classic dance. He arrived in Cuba on July 10, 1800, to work in a theater under construction, a rustic wooden coliseum with a thatched roof, set on the grounds of what today are the Fraternity Park and the National Capitol.

Two months later, on September 28, the first ballet show would take place in Cuba. It was the choreography "The Loggers", a pantomime dance, which details remain in the mist.

Cabrera, who confessed that he can be three days awake, if necessary, to check over and over again a detail, walks with ease through the 360 pages of the book, in which he writes about happy discoveries, like the premier of the complete version of Giselle in 1849 in the former Tacon Theater in Havana.

From the colonial period to the Alicia Alonso Ballet, today the National Ballet of Cuba, the author guides readers on a journey in which scholarliness, in arms of the amenity, attracts both specialists and ordinary people.(Prensa Latina)