American FLASH, Cuban SOUL.

Washington Ballet's trip to Havana was a homecoming of sorts for its director

Off the curving marble staircase in Havana's Gran Teatro, in a high-ceilinged room with floor-length windows and peeling paint, a balletmaster conducts a class for boys in their final year of training. The tropical sun streams in on their glistening bodies as they soar across the room in powerful jetes. "El publico! El publico! El publico!" the teacher shouts at them as they leap, pounding his cane for emphasis as they come to a dramatic finish, arms spread wide.

As their teacher reminds them, el publico, the public, is one of the defining elements of dance in Cuba, the country with perhaps the world's most fervent dance followers. And it is impressed upon the neophyte dancers that their job is to move that audience with the power and presentation of their performance.

Dance is a central part of life in Cuba. Thousands flock to performances by the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Hundreds sit and stand in a tree-lined courtyard on a Saturday afternoon, watching Ballet Folklorico dancers and musicians. The audience sings along with the performers, swinging their arms in rhythm, sometimes jumping up and joining in.

The National Ballet's director, Alicia Alonso, occupies a cherished spot in the national psyche. As a ballerina of world renown who danced into her 70s, who with her then-husband Fernando Alonso built a dance tradition and a company from scratch, she is universally revered. Now nearly blind and crippled with arthritis, Alonso still makes an entrance when she enters her box at the theater; the crowd leaps to its feet and cheers her, night after night.

It was Alonso who invited Septime Webre, the new artistic director of the Washington Ballet, to bring his company to dance at Cuba's seventeenth International Ballet Festival last October.

Webre has ties to Cuba that made the trip especially meaningful. He was born in the United States, but his mother was Cuban and his older siblings spent their childhood in Cuba until the family left after the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959. Webre grew up listening to their tales, but first visited the island only a year ago.

His company's visit reflects the improved climate of people-to-people meetings the two countries are now encouraging. Taking full advantage of that, Webre arrived in Havana for the festival with 130 dancers, students, choreographers, theater directors and presenters from around the United States to meet and interact with their Cuban counterparts.

What they found was a people low in material resources--dingy rehearsal rooms, poor-quality pointe shoes--but brimming with passion for dance.

Cuban dance technique is very strong--nearly everyone can do thirty-two fouettes, throwing in doubles and turning on a dime. Balances on pointe are held for prolonged lengths. And the men are prodigiously powerful, with razor-sharp landings.

The state-run training that produces these results is highly organized and extremely effective. Fernando Alonso is credited with shaping what is known as the Cuban technique. He says he threw in everything he had learned from studying and dancing in the U.S. with George Balanchine and others in the '30s and '40s.

"But really" the debonair Alonso says, "it was shaped by the Cubans themselves, their love of dance and their energy. That's the truth."

Children admitted to local schools of dance after a rigorous selection process have free tuition. Serious dance training is given to students from ages 9 to 14 in local schools around the country. After five years, there's another winnowing out, and for the final three years of advanced training the youngsters study either in Havana or Camaguey, the home of Cuba's second company. The best of them will enter the National Ballet.

Laura, a lively 18-year-old coming out of class, said she hoped to join the company and would like to dance some day with a major group like American Ballet Theatre or the New York City Ballet. Pointe shoes are hard to come by, so Laura says she has to be careful with hers. Students seem to use them a lot less in class than Americans do, and their footwork is less pliant.

Daily transportation to class is another problem. One peso, the equivalent of about five cents, buys five trips on a bus known as "the camel" because of its odd humped shape. But buses are infrequent and passengers are packed in so tightly it's a wonder they can breathe. So Laura was not able to make the trip to see the Washington Ballet, the first American ballet company to perform in Cuba in forty years.

In the next studio at Gran Teatro, the boys are finishing class. A boy named Servillo says transportation makes his day very long: "I have to get up at five in the morning to get the bus, and we finish late in the evening; there's only time to ride home and go to bed."

His friend Roma lives near the school, so transportation is not a problem for him. But still, Roma says, "The life of a dancer involves a lot of sacrifice. We're young; we like going to a discotheque or to the beach. Sometimes we have to forget about that and devote ourselves to dance. But we like it anyway."

Surprisingly, since male dancers are so good and so popular here and dancers occupy a more esteemed place in society than they do in the States, both young men said they had at first been reluctant to join the school because of taboos against it in this macho society. But, explained Webre, "A few really good male dancers in years past have served as excellent role models--success breeds success. They catch the boys when they're young and have them taking classes five or six days a week and dealing with it very seriously."

Dancers in the company make a living wage by Cuban standards, about as much as professionals like doctors do. But Servillo harks back to what is special about dancing in Cuba.

"From my point of view, the appreciation of the audience is our biggest reward," he says. "If people like the way we dance, that's the best gift we can have. If we don't get that applause, money won't matter."

The National Ballet tours a lot--to Spain and South America in particular--and that gives leading dancers the chance to earn dollars and buy their own cars. After they have dollars, they still need the government's approval for the purchase.

With the relaxing of some U.S.-Cuban restrictions, the United States may have a chance to see some of Cuba's finest dancers in the next few years. Three in particular stand out:

Lorna Feijoo, sister of the San Francisco Ballet's Lorena Feijoo [see story, page 54], is the company's reigning ballerina. Small, with dark hair framing her heart-shaped face, she moves with uncommon speed and lightness. She appeared opening night in a new production of Swan Lake opposite Jose Manuel Carreno, an American Ballet Theatre star who maintains his ties with the Cuban company. She also danced the company's premiere of George Balanchine's Ballo della Regina, performing with distinction the role created by Merrill Ashley and coached by Ashley herself. Feijoo is "one of the most special dancers I've ever seen," Ashley says. "She has everything--speed, strength, a big jump and a love of movement."

At the festival's closing gala, Feijoo sailed through Balanchine's Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, in that case with extra coaching from former Balanchine principal Lourdes Lopez and Feijoo's gallant partner, New York City Ballet dancer Damian Woetzel.

Rolando Sarabia is a wunderkind. Only 18, he already possesses a virtuoso technique in his lower body. He still has a slight teenage awkwardness in his upper body and the way he holds his head, but he nightly and rightly brings down the house with dazzling aerial turns ending in the tightest fifth position ever seen.

Unusually serious and focused, Sarabia says he has been approached by foreign companies, but wants to work further and mature before he considers any offers to join another company. He's already made repeated guest appearances in a dozen countries. Make no mistake: He is headed for a big international career.

Joel Carreno, a sunny, outgoing dancer, is the 20-year-old brother of Jose Manuel Carreno, 32. Joel's verve illuminated the male role in Ballo. He would like to do what his brother does--dance with a major American company--but that depends, he says, on Alicia Alonso.

"I have to talk to Alicia and ask her permission to go and come back," lie says. "Maybe she'll give me that permission, maybe not; I don't know." Dancers who leave without her blessing become in effect defectors, cannot come back to the company and are allowed only short visits to their families in Cuba.

Which brings us back to Alicia Alonso, the lodestar of Cuban ballet. Despite her infirmities, Alonso maintains a strenuous schedule, making public appearances and attending to major and minor matters of running the company. In her airy office at the company's ballet studios on a tree-lined residential street, she speaks about her company in a way that seems a metaphor for her own role in it.

"Our company dances very strongly, with a joy that goes right across to the audience," she says. "Another thing that's important: When they do the classics, they don't just learn the steps. They are acting a story, and when they are telling the story, for instance in Swan Lake, when the Queen comes, she's a very dominating Queen because she has the responsibility of the whole court; she dominates the Prince. That means she must show very strong and the peasants who work for her have to be scared."

Brilliant as many of her dancers are, the National Ballet of Cuba's cultural isolation is reflected in its repertoire. Septime Webre made a splash with the Washington Ballet's program, bringing the Cuban audience to its feet.

"I knew how much Cubans listen to music that's pulsating all over the city," Webre says. "So I knew that was going to be a big part of how we were going to connect with the Cuban public. And the development we've made in the United States of melding contemporary ideas, modern dance technique and ballet technique--that doesn't exist in Cuba. So I knew one of the things we could do for them is bring them a new expressive way of using ballet technique to reflect our own lives."

A major hit was a Trey McIntyre ballet that the company had premiered a month earlier at the Kennedy Center. An inventive, virtuoso work--and the Cubans adore virtuosity--Blue Until June had the added attraction of a raucous score of gospel songs made popular by Etta James, belted out by E. Faye Butler, backed up by American and Cuban musicians performing together for the first time.

The Washington dancers rode a wave, everything clicking into place. At the curtain calls they looked dazed as the audience cheers poured over them.

Ismael Albelo is the advisor on dance to the Cuban minister of culture. "I've gone to ballet performances for more than thirty years," he says, "and surely I've never seen on the Cuban stage a ballet company who performed with live jazz music and this kind of movement."

Webre brought his own choreography too--Mercedes y Betty, an impressionistic look at the Cuba he had heard about from his mother and siblings. The backdrop is a huge sepia-colored painting that looks like a page from a family album. The stage is bathed in a golden glow, suggesting time remembered, and the theme of family separation that Webre hints at struck a chord with the Cuban experience.

Ismael Albelo says he looks at his own family albums with tears in his eyes. "I have a lot of family in another part of the world and when I saw this dance I thought, `There is my cousin who lives in Virginia, there is my aunt who died in Florida.' It's a very sentimental composition for me."

Another sentimental aspect of the trip was the presence of Mary Day, the Washington Ballet's 90-year-old founder, who renewed her friendship with Alonso from many years past. The two worked together happily but briefly in the '50s, when Alonso guested in a company Day was running.

Choreographer Donald Byrd, also along on the trip, took note of Cuba's inclusiveness. "One of the remarkable things here in Cuba is the number of dance traditions that have value," he says. "Classical dance, Spanish dance, African dance, contemporary dance, folkloric dance--all seem to be supported by the government and the people. That's a statement that all of the elements that make up Cuba are worth nourishing."

The trip's successful interchanges will undoubtedly reverberate for a long time to come. Alicia Alonso, whose invitation made it all possible, says she'd like the exchange to continue as "a very big highway so we can keep going back and forth. If you give your art and we see the art, it's a very strong communication between the people of Cuba and the people--the real people--of North America."

The Cubans Are Coming

The cultural exchange will continue when Ballet Nacional de Cuba launches an extensive two-month tour beginning October 1 in Puerto Rico and continuing to about fifteen U.S. venues, including Berkeley and Orange County, California; Tempe, Arizona; Seattle, Washington; Chicago, Illinois; New Brunswick, New Jersey; Norfolk, Virginia, and New York's City Center (November 8-11), concluding with a week at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., that ends November 24. The tour repertoire, not finalized at press time, is expected to include Giselle and Coppelia.

Jean Battey Lewis, a freelance dance critic based in Washington, D.C., reports on dance for National Public Radio.