{"product_id":"dancing-with-cuba-isbn-9780375725814","title":"Dancing with Cuba","description":"In 1970 a young dancer named Alma Guillermoprieto left New York to take a job teaching at Cuba’s National School of Dance. For six months, she worked in mirrorless studios (it was considered more revolutionary); her poorly trained but ardent students worked without them but dreamt of greatness. Yet in the midst of chronic shortages and revolutionary upheaval, Guillermoprieto found in Cuba a people whose sense of purpose touched her forever. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this electrifying memoir, Guillermoprieto–now an award-winning journalist and arguably one of our finest writers on Latin America– resurrects a time when dancers and revolutionaries seemed to occupy the same historical stage and even a floor exercise could be a profoundly political act. Exuberant and elegiac, tender and unsparing, \u003cb\u003eDancing with Cuba\u003c\/b\u003e is a triumph of memory and feeling.“Not merely a marvelously lively and sympathetic memoir but also a resonant evocation of precisely what it’s like to be young.”  --\u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There is no clear course to the past but only a kind of dead reckoning. It is such reckoning that gives authenticity to Ms. Guillermoprieto’s uneasy and fascinating account, and more than 30 years after the events, a pulsing sense of discovery.”  \u003ci\u003e--The New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“One of the most astute and eloquent chroniclers of contemporary Latin America. . . . Guillermoprieto’s description of everyday life under the revolution is intimate and poignant, and also tough-minded and shrewd.”  --\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003cb\u003eDancing with Cuba\u003c\/b\u003e is about falling in love with this mythic place or, more precisely, trying to. . . . A sympathetic yet ultimately unsparing account of a personal odyssey that ends not triumphantly but nonetheless extraordinarily.” --\u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A pleasure to read, full of humanity, sly humor, curiosity and knowledge.\" —Katha Pollitt, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Written with the deftness that has made Guillermoprieto's dispatches in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e some of the best writing on Latin America, \u003cb\u003eDancing with Cuba\u003c\/b\u003e makes a significant contribution to the in-depth understanding of contemporary Cuba.\" -\u003ci\u003eThe Miami Herald\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Few dancers write memoirs, and so the world of dance remains an elegant mystery to many of us… This is a tale, then, of artists and poets, dancers and architects — bewildered, always in conflict, trying to keep alive standards which they knew were essential, but which were also suspect, not to say dangerous.” —Doris Lessing, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Observer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"An honest memoir filled with the struggles most young people wrestle with: love, identity and idealism.\" -\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The memoir's greatest strength is its ability to infect the reader with the feverish, hopeful and heartbreaking sense of the early days of the revolution.\" —\u003ci\u003eElle\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"As much a pleasure as an astonishment.\" - \u003ci\u003eHarper's\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Written with dignity and without rhetoric or undue emotion: when this author flays her feelings, it's because she is utterly alive with protest.\" -\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Guillermoprieto is one of the most perceptive commentators on Latin America, a writer whose political analysis is sensitive to culture and history and punctuated by telling details that illuminate larger dilemmas. This bittersweet remembrance of youthful hopes and disillusionment, of the contrast  between the idealism of revolutionary aspirations and the clay feet of day-to-day revolutionaries, is set against the story of six months she spent in Cuba as a dance teacher in 1970…this marvelous book is almost impossible to put down.” —\u003ci\u003eForeign Affairs\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Gracefully told...splendidly rendered into English by Esther Allen.\" - \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A vivid chronicle.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“In exploring her own evolving relationship to art and politics…[Guillermoprieto] proposes a genuinely original take on history.  To the traditional discussion of events and ideologies she adds psychology, rhetorical analysis, and, most provocatively, ideas about how one’s physical body participates in the experience of cultural identity.” —Sarah Kerr, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e “ [A] beautifully written novelistic memoir.”  \u003ci\u003eSan Antonio Express-News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A compelling look back — from the safe wisdom of middle age — at the role a revolution played in transforming this young dancer into a journalist.” —\u003ci\u003eSacramento News \u0026amp; Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An insightful account of a time when the revolution was past its dawn but had not yet descended into cynical political bankruptcy…also a powerful memoir of a sometimes painful journey that ‘thoroughly unraveled’ its author’s life, turning a naïve young artist into a confusedly politicized adult.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Excellent…Guillermoprieto writes so well.” —\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Guillermoprieto brings out the flavor of the time…insightful.” —\u003ci\u003eStreet Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (Miami)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[\u003cb\u003eDancing with Cuba\u003c\/b\u003e] is a loose mix of half-memories, reporting and musings on the place and meaning of art…The mix works for some of the same reasons Guillermoprieto had such difficulty in Cuba — the sophisticated, intelligent singularity of her voice, her insistence on recognizing life’s grays and her sly wit.” —\u003ci\u003eAssociated Press\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A bittersweet page-turner.” —\u003ci\u003eDance Teacher\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“[\u003cb\u003eDancing with Cuba\u003c\/b\u003e] is elegantly written and captures both the spirit and rhythms of Cuba during a period of dramatic change and political upheaval.” —\u003ci\u003eTucson Citizen\u003c\/i\u003e (Tuscon, AZ)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A vivid memoir.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “In recalling and reconstructing those days, [Guillermoprieto] has given us a convincing portrait of a young woman torn between her sympathy for those in need and her desire to do nothing except her art, between her conviction that the Castroites were trying to do good and her revulsion at their rhetoric, their methods and their very selves.” —\u003ci\u003eThe \u003cbr\u003eWashington Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eAlma Guillermoprieto writes frequently for \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e (where the first chapter of this book appeared in 2002) and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e. She is the author of \u003cb\u003eLooking for History\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eThe Heart That Bleeds\u003c\/b\u003e, and \u003cb\u003eSamba\u003c\/b\u003e, and she was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1995.  Raised in Mexico and the United States, she now makes her home in Mexico City.ONE    New York    One autumn day in 1969, before the start of the advanced class at the Merce  Cunningham dance studio, Merce came over to me and said that there were two  opportunities for teaching modern dance that he thought might interest me.  One was in Caracas, with a group of dancers who were only just forming their  own company, and the other was in Havana, where there was a  government-funded school dedicated to modern dance.    My life in dance had been routine and predictable until then, if not exactly  normal. In Mexico, my native country, I joined a modern dance company at the  age of twelve. At sixteen I left my father's home and traveled to New York  to live with my mother, who had moved here following her separation from my  father. I kept on dancing. At first I took classes at the Martha Graham  studio. In the world of modern dance the brilliant, temperamental Martha was  the most revered choreographer. Starting in the 1930s, she had  revolutionized not only dance but theater as well; her use of sets and  costumes turned on its head every standard notion of what can be done and  communicated on a stage. Her quest for a body language that reflected the  deepest inner conflicts, and the way she used gestures and movements to  stage great myths, centering them on the internal universe of a single  woman--Medea, Joan of Arc, Eve, all of them ultimately Martha herself in any  case--brought her admirers and disciples from all the arts. She was,  moreover, the first creator of modern dance to devise a truly universal  dance technique out of the movements she developed in her choreography. I  had studied Graham technique in Mexico, and one of my reasons for moving to  New York had been to train directly at the source, at Martha's studio on  East Sixty-third Street.    By that time, in the mid-1960s, Martha was very old and more or less pickled  in alcohol. She put in rare appearances at her own studio, interrupting even  a class that one of her best dancers was teaching to hurl philosophical  exhortations and wounding comments at us, mocking our lack of passion and  our flabby muscles. One of my most terrifying memories is of a mute hiatus  during a class when all of us stood frozen in some pose Martha had demanded  while she moved through the room, pinching this dancer in a rage, giving  that one a tongue-lashing. Pain was necessary for dance, she always said,  and I think at that stage in her life she wanted to contribute to our  training by guaranteeing that we would suffer. After a couple of years of  this I felt the need for a less orthodox and oppressive atmosphere and  switched to the Cunningham studio, partly because I admired Merce's work  with all my heart and partly because, after Martha's, Merce's studio was the  best known.    Elegant, alert, and unfailingly courteous, Merce Cunningham was an  established artist at the forefront of the Manhattan avant-garde. Modern  dance has always been an art of the few, and there are not many  choreographers who, like Merce, can afford the luxury of a standing company,  and fewer still who have a studio where they and their company can earn  money and create a pool of future dancers by offering daily classes. Even  so, the studio and the classes barely enabled Merce and his company members  to get by. His audience was devoted but small, and during performances one  sometimes heard boos and hisses from baffled spectators who hadn't imagined,  when they purchased their tickets, that the dancers would not go en pointe  and that the accompaniment would be not tuneful music but a series of sounds  generally produced at random, either on traditional instruments like John  Cage's delightful \"prepared piano\" or, more often, by means of electronic  gadgets. That was the case in Winterbranch, a rather long dance with no  stage light that was performed throughout to a very loud metallic  screech--hard even for the dancers to take.    Friend, collaborator, and source of inspiration to artists like Jasper Johns  and Robert Rauschenberg, lifelong companion and creative partner of the  composer John Cage, Merce, always an innovator, always evolving, was  respected even by his detractors for the clean harmony of his work, for the  simple, lucid logic of the technique taught at his studio, and for the  modest, unassuming way he had one day taken his leave of Martha's company,  where he had been a principal dancer. Without any rhetorical fuss he left  behind the obsession with passion and narrative that was characteristic of  Martha and her disciples; the use of dramaturgy as the connecting thread of  choreography; and rhythmic music that guided the dancers' movements like a  tambourine leading a trained bear in a circus. Instead, he chose to pursue  the meandering paths of abstraction, chance, and Zen philosophy.Yet his  avant-garde experiments never interfered with the technical perfection and  extraordinary refinement of his choreography. In his own way he was a  classicist.    Those of us who left Martha's studio for Merce's were attracted by that  Apollonian temperament, which demanded concentration and intensity but  rejected drama. It was mainly women who came to his little studio on Third  Avenue at Thirty-third Street to take beginning, intermediate, and advanced  classes, and quite a few of us were in flight from Martha. Merce's courteous  distance came as cool salve on a burn, though it too had its price. Merce  sometimes taught a beginners' class that started at six p.m. He didn't say  much but would correct the students very patiently, and several of the more  advanced dancers, including some who were already members of the company,  would take the six o'clock class in the hope that Merce would at least cast  a glance at them. All of us saw him as a flame flickering in a dark chapel.  We spoke his name as if it were written entirely in capital letters, and we  laid siege to him with our eyes. In return, he almost never said a word to  any of us.        The fleeting heyday of American dance was just beginning, and most of us who  were to be found in the modern dance studios then, with who knows what  tangle of secret dreams inside us, had to work as secretaries or waitresses  (I was the latter) in order to pay for classes and our own spartan expenses.  This meant that we came to class already tired. Merce's studio was a bare  cave that stank of sweat and often lacked heat on the coldest winter days.  Our motley layers of sweaters and sweatpants couldn't protect us from the  cold. The concrete floor was covered with shabby black linoleum, and before  class we would wrap tape around our feet in an effort to close up the  alarming cracks that appeared on our bare soles as we spun across that  adhesive surface. After class we rinsed off the sweat as best we could at  the sink in the studio's tiny bathroom, then went home on the subway,  sprawled in the seats to give our rebellious muscles some relief. All of  this took its toll on our bodies, but we had no money for massages or  therapies. As it was, David Vaughan, the brisk but softhearted Englishman  who took our money at the front desk--and who is to this day the company's  resident historian--more often than not gave us a stern look and a class  ticket on credit. We went on ridiculous diets: a friend asked me privately  one afternoon, with a blush, whether I thought constipation could have a  significant effect on your weight; she'd been feeding on lettuce and  broccoli for a week, had been constipated for five days, and had weighed  herself on five scales but hadn't lost a pound on any of them. Generally, by  about age thirty-five, dancers no longer have healthy feet or knees or much  elasticity left in their tendons, ligaments, and joints. We were eighteen,  twenty, twenty-five years old, and we were the oldest young people in the  world: our time was already running out.    Men were so scarce in this world that choreographers fought over them even  if their feet were as flat as pancakes and their shoulders looked as if  they'd been left dangling from a hook at birth. They strolled into class  with a self-sufficient air, while we women were fervent and eternal  supplicants, forever hoping against hope, suicidal gamblers who--despite the  mirror's daily confirmation that our insteps were too low, our hips too  wide, our legs too short, our arms too long, and our backs too stiff--would  nevertheless go off to class in search of the miracle that would fulfill all  our desires. Look at me, say I'm beautiful, say I'm for you. Choose me. Let  me dance in your company.    When Merce didn't teach the beginners' class himself, he was replaced by one  of the younger members of his company. The intermediate class was passed  around among more established members of the company, and when they were on  tour, it was taught by other dancers, most of whom had performed with Merce  at some point. Though the intermediate class seemed to hold little interest  for him and he rarely taught it, on his way up to his small apartment over  the dance studio he used to pause in the doorway for a few moments, one  shoulder lightly resting against the frame, his long arms folded neatly  against his torso, his long legs together, and his curly head--heavy and  canine--tilted attentively to one side, watching us. I would watch him too  out of the corner of my eye, and I liked to think that he was sending me  some correction with his gaze, which I caught in midflight and obeyed. I  liked even more to think that he was aware that I did.    It was after one of those classes that he approached me for the first time.  Merce, then fifty years old, employed certain well-worn theatrical tricks  that nevertheless worked their full effect on us. One consisted of deploying  his immense courtesy to convey the impression that you were doing him a  favor by listening to him; another was to speak so softly that you were  forced to concentrate completely on his words. That afternoon he leaned  toward me to murmur that if I agreed and it was convenient, I might want to  start taking the advanced class (which he almost invariably taught himself).  That encounter, which can't have lasted more than thirty seconds, was one of  the heart-stopping moments of my life.        It would never have occurred to me that there might be anything better in  life than dance. I suffered because it was my destiny to suffer: I was  plagued, among other things, by crippling shyness, by a sense that I was  superfluous in the world, by a feeling that my face and body were  unacceptable, by insomnia, loneliness, and severe anxiety attacks that often  kept me even from going to class. But I had no complaints at all about my  life, which, seen from this distance, truly was marvelous.    My comrades in enchantment and I stood in line for three whole nights, one  after the other, to buy cheap tickets for the standing-room section of the  Metropolitan Opera House. (Someone always brought coffee and cookies for  everyone in the line, and the spirit of solidarity was absolute.) For three  nights running we watched Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn perform Kenneth  MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. We watched all three performances standing up  but at the back of the orchestra section, at much closer range than we could  otherwise have afforded. The memory of Nureyev falling to his knees in  ecstasy to cover Fonteyn's skirt with kisses still takes my breath away. The  Martha Graham company was at the height of its glory. In 1965, during a  three-week season at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, we took in the entire  repertory of that monstrous genius (again, standing behind the last row in  the orchestra section). During those three weeks our state of exaltation was  so great that we managed only with difficulty to eat or speak.    My romance with Merce began the following year. Several of us went to a  performance in a small auditorium at Hunter College, and the sight of such  pure, limpid dance, so free of sentimental baggage that it seemed to be  performed by a flock of subtle, iridescent birds, convinced me immediately  that I was in the presence of a true revolutionary. It wasn't long before I  left Martha's studio.    New York City offered us much more than dance. We watched Japanese and  Italian movies at the Thalia and alternative films at midnight at the  Waverly or the Bleecker Street Cinema. We learned that if we arrived at the  New York State Theater after the first intermission, the ushers would let us  in to watch the rest of the New York City Ballet's program free, and thus we  became familiar with a good part of George Balanchine's repertory. At the  Apollo Theater we saw Wilson Pickett and James Brown; at the Fillmore East,  Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin. We had a friend who worked as an usher  and helped us sneak into Carnegie Hall, and we put together expert picnics  in Central Park while waiting in line for free tickets to the performances  there.    One day we heard that the revolution was in Brooklyn, and we went to the  Academy of Music--again, we stood in line all afternoon, this time waiting  for half-price tickets--to see the legendary Living Theatre, back in New  York after a long exile in Europe. The actors took their clothes off and  crawled naked all over the audience, which struck us as thrilling in the  extreme. It was the period when the traditional divisions were beginning to  blur between classical and modern dance, dance and the martial arts, dance  and theater, improvisation and performance. Joe Chaikin and Jean-Claude van  Itallie, Robert Wilson, and the actors at the Performing Garage were  inventing revolutionary theatrical forms, and we were inventing a new form  of dance.    I say \"we\" because though I was neither a choreographer nor a famous,  outstanding, or even promising dancer, I too was part of this avant-garde,  dancing here and there with choreographers who were getting their start.  There was Margaret Jenkins, for example, a dancer who taught Merce's  intermediate class when the company was on tour, and who was starting to  create her own choreography: she'd book a performance at a theater in Queens  or in a Staten Island gym and then ask several of us who took her class to  rehearse with her.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303887163621,"sku":"NP9780375725814","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375725814.jpg?v=1767724454","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/dancing-with-cuba-isbn-9780375725814","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}