Carlos Acosta, dancer: Ballet is for everyone

0:00Carlos Acosta:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Michael Berkeley:an award-winning behavioural scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change, as she shares true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we make the choices we do and how to make better ones to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

0:53Michael Berkeley:Hello, I'm BBC presenter Michael Barclay and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. the best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world. I want to get freedom. I like their freedom. A gender-equal world would be a better world for men too. We need this is fire. We need healing. We need trust.

1:17Carlos Acosta:These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do.

1:21Michael Berkeley:This is a war. The first thing that we want is the war to end. For this interview, I met Carlos Acosta, star of the ballet world and director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, at Broadcasting House in central London. Born in 1973, Acosta grew up in a poor part of Havana, the 11th child in a very large family. After he began training at the National Ballet School of Cuba at nine years old, he quickly rose to prominence. At 18, he became the youngest principal dancer at the English National Ballet. And after gaining further international experience, Acosta joined the Royal Ballet in 1998, making it his home for nearly two decades and performing every major classical role.

2:11Michael Berkeley:Such was his impact. In 2014, he received a CBE in Queen Elizabeth's Honours List for services to ballet. Now the director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, he's fostered some unexpected collaborations, including a show based on the music of the city's heavy rock legends Black Sabbath, as well as classics like Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.

2:35Carlos Acosta:I thought we always have the classics that are not going anywhere, the Nutcracker, the Swan Lakes, but we had to try to bring new audience members, and so therefore we had to bring ballets that mean something to them. So I had the idea to create a ballet using this iconic band, Black Sabbath, which in many ways means Birmingham. So this was going to be a collusion of the two worlds. It was a big sellout. It spoke to people that not normally consume what Birmingham Royal Ballet do. We pick up awards for it. It's a way of redefining ballet so that it is an expression of who we are today.

3:20Michael Berkeley:Welcome to The Interview from the BBC World Service with Carlos Acosta. Tell us about your early life a bit growing up in Cuba, a pretty rough and difficult childhood, I imagine.

3:32Carlos Acosta:The first thing the audience needs to know is that I didn't like ballet at all. In fact, I'm going to use the word hate here because I was more like street kids. I performed what was very fashionable at the time, which was the break dancing, the hip-hop movement. I wanted to be the next Michael Jackson. But I have a very stubborn dad that saw that my life was leading towards a life of petty crime at the age of nine. And so he decided, as a way of discipline, put me in a ballet school in the center of the city. So I had no choice to select this. It was my father who chose it for me. But it took three years until I developed a vocation and a love for it.

4:20Carlos Acosta:What did your father, Pedro, do? My father used to transport selected fruit up and down the island in a lorry. So he sometimes will be absent from home for weeks. So I was kind of like, you know, a kid that had a lot of freedom, that didn't have boundaries. I didn't like school. My father was in and out of home, but I always make sure that I had the best chances that he had. He was born in 1918, and he was a man of his time. And at that time, in the 2030 Cuba, it was a time of racial segregation. And so he wanted to make sure that I used the privilege that the Cuban Revolution had given me to study my art for free.

5:09Carlos Acosta:and therefore it was always very rigid and restricted. He wanted to make sure that I was always in school and that I became the best dancer I could be. And your mum suffered from ill health. Yes, when I was 10 years old, my mum had a brain hemorrhage so she had a very delicate surgery and that was during the time that my father was in jail for two years. So all of a sudden my situation became that my older sister was the one who was doing the cooking, but was a kind of chemical experiment what she was able to concoct. I will probably go every day to the school wearing the same uniform, no, no fresh uniform, because we didn't have the time or my sister didn't have the time how to watch it so that I can have it ready for the next day.

6:02Carlos Acosta:so it was a very sad time during those early days for me.

6:08Michael Berkeley:Why was your father in prison? He was obviously disciplined as you say and successful.

6:13Carlos Acosta:My father was in prison because he was standing in a traffic light with his lorry and he was going to turn the corner and somebody with a motorcycle with a sidecar came and skipped the red light and then crashed into his lorry and so he says that he didn't have a good lawyer to defend him and there was a woman who died in that accident and so he went to jail for two years for that.

6:40Michael Berkeley:When your father sent you to the National Ballet School of Cuba, aged nine, did you already have that kind of breakdancing ability? Were you already quite athletic?

6:50Carlos Acosta:I won a prize. I used to spin on my back and in my head and I was one of those kids. Always, whenever I wasn't in the school, you could bet that I was breakdancing in the streets or Havana somewhere. But obviously, even if you have ability for this kind of dancing, doesn't mean that you could be good at ballet. As you know, ballet is very specific, but my father took me to this audition anyway, and it turned out that I have musicality, I have flexibility, and so they decided to take me in.

7:24Michael Berkeley:The National Ballet of Cuba came to your town. Did that sort of change things for you when you saw them?

7:31Carlos Acosta:So they kicked me out from the school finally because I was the kind of kid that whenever I was put into a choreography, the school didn't have the certainty that I was going to turn up for the show anyway. And so after leaving the school show hanging, everybody was waiting for me and I wasn't there in the show. So they had to go and find me wherever I was and took me to the stage. They decided I was unreliable and they kicked me out from the school. So I ended up boarding in Pinal del Rio. And while I was there, age 13, I saw the National Valley of Cuba for the first time. and then I realised that I was starting to become one of those professionals.

8:16Carlos Acosta:I liked the way that they were built, they had this muscling, athletic, they were lifting the girls with one hand, they could jump. That was my wake of call into this art form. So I decided to really, from that point on, dedicate everything, all the energy to become the best I could be.

8:35Michael Berkeley:Your first visit to Europe was when you came to Turin and won the Prix de Lausanne Ballet Competition at the age of 16?

8:43Carlos Acosta:That's right. By that stage, I returned to the National Ballet School of Cuba. The head of all the schools in Cuba saw me and decided to take me to Italy as a part of the cultural exchange that the Teatro Nuevo de Torino in Turin and the National Ballet School of Cuba had. And while I was there performing, a Romanian choreographer told my teacher that she should prepare me for Prix de Lausanne, which was a competition for youngsters. And so she did. She took that advice, prepared me. I went into the competition, 127 competitors. My number was number 127. And miraculously, I won the competition and my life changed.

9:32Michael Berkeley:And what did your family make of that back in Cuba?

9:36Carlos Acosta:Oh, I was a hero. When I came back, because I was representing the school, I came back and, you know, the entire school was there to receive me in the airport. And, you know, it was just a moment of joy. Obviously, it was the very first time that my picture appeared in the newspaper. And, of course, that prize was for the school. It belonged to the school. So, yeah, it was great. And, of course, in my neighborhood, Los Pinos, I was sort of like a local celebrity. and so yeah that made my father and mother very very happy and proud.

10:10Michael Berkeley:You must have been thinking about home because when you were 18 you became the youngest principal dancer at the English National Ballet.

10:19Carlos Acosta:Yeah absolutely and it was a period as well where Cuba a complex time, Cuba became disconnected from the world in what we call the special period because the iron curtain came down although the communist country disintegrated and Cuba being an island didn't produce much, you know, became utterly alone. A lot of people in their desperation fled the island, took to the sea and so I was watching constantly and following the news back home.

10:51Michael Berkeley:You spent a year in the UK and then returned to Cuba to join the National Ballet there. Did that feel like returning home and doing what you love at home?

11:01Carlos Acosta:Yes, in many ways. And it was so enticing to stay, even though that a lot of people would say, no, you should leave because that was a time where everybody wanted to leave. There was no oil. There was no food. I had to ride the bicycle for miles and miles to then have eight hours a day of ballet and then take the bicycle back home. so we were all really skinny, but I was so happy because I was at home and I was with my parents and with my sister again. So it was sort of like a paradox. Everybody wanted to leave, I was the only one who wanted to stay.

11:37Michael Berkeley:You were the first black principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. Did you begin to realise how important diversity in ballet was at that time?

11:46Carlos Acosta:At that time, unlike now, which I think it has improved tremendously and I'm very happy with the results. At that time, we didn't have the right representation on stage. Obviously, there were also not a lot of black ballet dancers from which to choose from. So that lack of representation, you know, it could be interpreted that was a choice by the director so that they delivered shows not to go down that route where I see it completely differently. I think in many ways ballet is a cultural thing. That's why it's very important that, you know, expose this world early on so that people from different cultures see ballet as a way of a career.

12:34Carlos Acosta:But in the 90s or 2000 was pretty much close. We didn't have in school even a lot of black ballet dancers from which to choose from. But now, obviously, things will move on, and now the diversity is at the top of every director's agenda. It's great, you know, we see a big shift as well, and we see the right kind of representation of the world as we have it today on stage.

13:05Michael Berkeley:You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service.

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14:16Michael Berkeley:I had the extraordinary privilege of first meeting Carlos as a composer because he was dancing at the Royal Ballet and he ended up dancing some of my music. He's a charming man, full of ideas and always looking at new ways of presenting dance and music. It was wonderful, therefore, to meet him again for this interview because he's such a charming man, so full of life, so excited by music, with great passion. OK, let's return to my conversation with Carlos Acosta. In 2009, you did something rather wonderful. You helped bring the Royal Ballet to Cuba for the first time. That must have felt like a homecoming for you.

14:58Carlos Acosta:Yeah, that was one of those things, you know, I will never forget. For many years, I wanted to perform all those roles. I was performing everywhere else, but Cuba was missing them. And so I sort of thought that I have a lot of growth, a decent growth, but I wasn't able to share with my family or in Cuba, my country. And so we managed to bring the company there. And I performed in Cuba in front of a packed audience, and it was amazing. We had screenings all over town where people who couldn't get into the theatre could just go with their bicycles and sat down and watch the show. I think they're still talking about that today.

15:45Michael Berkeley:Dancing for the length of time that you have danced must take quite a toll on your body, or have you survived quite well?

15:53Carlos Acosta:No, I have like about five surgeries in my ankle, but it comes part of, you know, the package, obviously. The instrument, our instrument is our body and it's almost, you can't be 100 % fit all the time when you expose your body for eight hours a day of these intensive exercises. But having said that, I consider myself very lucky because some people might have problems with their back, their disc, knee problems, chin problems. My right ankle is the one that has been literally my Achilles heel for me. It's what we call a bone spur. I have a bone spur that get loose, and every so often I had to remove it.

16:38Carlos Acosta:It's been like that my entire career, so I have like five surgeries because of that. But apart from that, you know, my body's been great.

16:46Michael Berkeley:There's now a whole new team of people working on the physical needs of dancers, isn't there? In fact, I remember the Royal Ballet had a team that were working with the Arsenal Football Club at one point to compare notes with the stress and strains that footballers and dancers undergo, because they're very similar.