Carlos Acosta: A Leap into the Unknown

PHOTOGRAPHY BY OLIVIA ARTHUR / MAGNUM FOR TIME
Beauty in ugliness Acosta is leaving ballet for the freedom of modern dance

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All the while, Acosta faced the pressure of being a Cuban citizen in the West, forced to balance love of his homeland with the acknowledgement of its poverty and political isolation. Living between two such disparate worlds left Acosta with a permanent sense of dislocation and exile: the title of his 2007 autobiography is No Way Home . "I didn't chose ballet and for years I rebelled against it, believing it kept me from my family, from home, and from happiness," says Acosta, who now holds both Cuban and British citizenship. "But it eventually became not my home but my shelter. I have come to terms with it. But it has taken many years."

Acceptance has never translated into unconditional love, however. Acosta still resents how ballet celebrates the artificial, and turns dancers into literal equivalents of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker: beautiful windup toys performing for the audience's pleasure. "Ballet is a formula and it's unorganic. It is antihuman," he says. "A square here" he puts his arms out in front of him "a box there" he raises his arms above his head. "Humans were not meant to move that way, let alone while jumping high in the air." Worse, Acosta says, ballet dancers must contort themselves into unnatural and painful positions with smiles on their faces, always projecting joy and effortlessness.

If there is, to borrow the title of one of Acosta's favorite novels, an unbearable lightness to being a ballet dancer, Acosta pushes against it with a new show that ventures into weightier territory. At a recent rehearsal in north London, the dancer his hair unkempt, his blue sweatpants resembling hospital scrubs moved wildly around the studio to discordant music. But he stayed grounded there was not a single leap, and underneath the motions ran a subterranean desperation, a heartbeat of discontent. "I am searching for a transition," Acosta says. "The artistry is still in me. It's a question of finding the right vocabulary and language for your artistry."

According to Alistair Spalding, artistic director of Sadler's Wells, the London performing-arts venue putting on Premieres , the show is sure to be a sellout, thanks to the strength of Acosta's brand and his popularity among female dance lovers drawn to his Latino sex appeal. But will an audience that adores him for the refined beauty of his ballet embrace a more raw Acosta?

"Charisma is charisma, it doesn't matter the form," says Edwaard Liang, choreographer of one of the Premieres pieces and a former ballet dancer. "You can feel it right away when you meet him. But it's especially evident when he is onstage moving. He's very laid-back but he has the extreme intensity as well. That will come across in this show, just as it does in his ballet performances."

Liang believes that Acosta's afterlife as a choreographer and modern dancer has the potential to make him as great as Sylvie Guillem, the French ballet dancer whose choreography has been acclaimed as genre-changing. It's still too early to tell if Acosta's new forays will grant him such posterity. But as he dons his tights and slippers for his last seasons at the Royal Ballet, and takes those magical leaps in which he seems so happily suspended, his smile will be that of an artist longing to be free of ballet's physical obligations. Soon he will have that freedom, and he has big plans for what it will allow him to create. "My generation has not produced a piece of dance like Swan Lake something that is forever. Maybe we can do it, and maybe I can help," he says. "I dream big. But given my story, why wouldn't I?"