RENÉ DE CÁRDENAS

Choreographer

RENÉ DE CÁRDENAS

For 30 years René de Cárdenas danced with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, working under the direction of the great Alicia Alonso and alongside a generation of Cuban dance legends — Jorge Esquivel, Andrés Williams, José Zamorano, Romel Frómeta. As a dancer he has performed in Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Belgium, Venezuela, Poland, Colombia, Spain, the Dominican Republic and the United States.

As a choreographer Cárdenas has created about a dozen short pieces that have entered into the repertories of various Cuban dance troupes. But as he tells it, all of that was a mere prelude to Sonlar, his first evening-long production and the first to be performed by his own Compagnia René de Cárdenas before a Cuban audience. Sonlar opened in December 2004 in Havana’s National Theater and has been touring the world ever since. Foreign critics have compared it to Broadway musicals like Stomp and A Chorus Line, and the irony isn’t lost on Cárdenas, who insists his inspiration for Sonlar came from a much more obvious source — his hometown.

Sonlar shows a day in the life of a Havana solar, a kind of communal house where several families all live together. "What’s interesting is the rhythm, Afro-Cuban rhythm, and all the rhythm happens without musical instruments," Cárdenas explains. "The music comes from pots and pans, brooms, wash basins, hammers, fans.”

"I wanted to tell a story that was very Cuban, very habanera. One day I took my daughter to her friend’s house, near the Malecón, and I found myself in a solar. I went in and heard all these sounds. It was early in the day and a man was fixing a bicycle, pounding it with a hammer. A woman was sweeping. Someone was shouting ’Pass me the sugar!’"

Cárdenas grew up in Havana (not, however, in a solar) and his mother, a professor at Cuba’s National Art Academy, wanted him to play the violin. "I was a failure at the violin — I didn’t have an ear for it," he recalls. "Maybe that’s why so many other things make music in Sonlar." His mother then decided her son should audition as a dancer, which wasn’t bad career advice given the shortage of dancers in the years after the Cuban Revolution. Cárdenas was reluctant: "I didn’t want to be a dancer — I thought it wasn’t something a man should do."

After three decades of dancing and touring, and after a foot injury that made his work increasingly painful, he knew he would have to stop performing. "There was no trauma," he insists. "I think I went as far as I could as a ballet dancer." He was also well along the road to his future as a director and choreographer. And if the international success of Sonlar is any indication, his greatest achievements may still lay ahead.

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René de Cardenas

RENÉ DE CÁRDENAS

Choreographer

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