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• Arts and Culture
• Caribbean
• culture an traditions
• Dance
• Destinations
• history
• national
• 03 / 16 / 2009

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With the passing of the years it became the National Modern Dance Group, afterwards the Cuban National Dance and by the end of the eighties it became the Cuban Contemporary Dance (DCC in Spanish)

Technique, style and renewal are three of the many adjectives that describe Cuban Contemporary Dance, a group that has fused together Afro-Spanish and Caribbean roots with different dancing genres since its very beginning. Applauded in every stage it has gone through, the company, strong, young and disconcerting, full of creative power, arrives to its fiftieth anniversary of work on stage.

Professor Miguel Iglesias, who was first dancer of the company and since 24 years ago the leading hand of the future of the DCC, comments on the reason for the change: “From Ramiro to myself there have been 14 directors in the company, that means that there were some very short directions when everything was done, what had to be done and what don’t. The name of the Cuban National Dance lead to confusion, the word contemporary refers to here and now. Contemporary Dance is a name that may remain eternally with the company.”

But leading DCC is more than changing its name or leaving each presentation in the taste of the public, for Iglesias to lead is also to learn, “I have learned a lot directing, I had to be a director in order to realize what it was all about. The company has changed a lot over these years and I have changed with it.”

“I learned –he adds- from the young people that it was necessary to join opinions into a straight line, you have to know how to put everyone in their right place and to receive from them everything they can offer you. It is to learn from young people while you appear to teach them.”

The key of the experienced director lies in mixing young people with more experienced ones, “I let myself follow my instincts, even if I don’t understand what the young man says, there is something that makes me follow him. I like it when they have their own opinion and when they question me, because that means, in one way or another that I taught them how to think.”

Most of the members of the DCC, with an age average of 24 years, have graduated from the Modern and Folk National Dance School and from the Ballet School. Iglesias, who is also paying attention to artistic teaching as vice-president of Staging Arts from UNEAC, says that there is a very close relationship between the company and the schools. The teacher, who has prepared and received a countless number of dancers at the age of sixty, explains the need to teach in an environment creative for the young students. “In our case, the composition lessons in the elementary level are to unfold their psycho-physical vision of the world and to take out their capabilities to dominate the body and to create.”

“The dancer has to be alert, listening to their sensations and to the energy of the body in order to unify the movement to a single point. It is not about being ideal or sophisticated, but about applying a series of muscular and articular techniques when moving. It has also to have reference about universal dance because to dance is not to flap; it is not to throw movements just for the sake of it, it is to get their intentions to be expressed through movement.”

Today’s Contemporary Dance –with an average of eight premieres a year- is not the one founded by Guerra, declares Iglesias, even though it has its meeting points with what began fifty years ago, “I have a key point in the risk taken at the time with a new stage, with a new theatre.”

(Cubarte)