DANCE : Ballet Folklorico: ‘A Show With Mexican Blood’

There are 15,000 folk ballets registered in Mexico, and none of them reaches the toes of my ballet.

--Amalia Hernandez, founder, director, choreographer, Ballet Folklorico de Mexico

After decades of commercial success, Amalia Hernandez, the grande dame of Mexican dance, has come under attack in the press here recently, accused of distorting her art to cater to the tastes of tourists.

“Intended, above all, for foreign consumption, the celebrated Ballet Folklorico of world-admirer Amalia Hernandez has little to say to Mexicans,” reporter Rosario Manzanos wrote in the weekly news magazine Proceso last month.

Hernandez has failed to adequately research or understand Mexico’s native dances, half a dozen anthropologists and choreographers assert in this and another Proceso article. Neither folklore nor ballet, they say, Hernandez’s Ballet Folklorico is an invention of her own. A show.

Precisely, responds Hernandez, who at 70 has heard such criticism more than once.

“I do as all great artists do who take a theme, a feeling, an idea and develop a mural or a symphony,” Hernandez declares in an interview at her ballet school.

“I am not trying to make an ethnological portrait. It is impossible to create an authentic folk dance--the only true folk dances are those performed by native dancers in their own village festivals. But I examine the feeling behind a dance, why the people dance, for whom and when they are dancing.

“I try to go to the most profound roots of folklore and tradition, but my intention is to create a show--a show with Mexican sources and Mexican blood,” she says. As for her critics, “ask them what they do. They copy me . . . .”

After touring Europe, China and most of the world, Hernandez brings her Ballet Folklorico to Los Angeles and San Diego this month for the first time in 10 years. The troupe will appear at Shrine Auditorium Friday through next Sunday and in San Diego’s Civic Theatre Sept. 22-23. The company’s appearance in Los Angeles, arranged by the Mexican consulate, coincides with the celebration of Mexican Independence Day, Friday.

Other folk ballets from Mexico have visited Los Angeles in recent years, most notably Sylvia Lozano’s Ballet Folclorico Nacional. But even Hernandez’s critics concede that her company was the first of its kind and the one that brought international fame to Mexican dance.

The style and format of Hernandez’s Ballet Folklorico has been imitated by folk dance groups throughout Latin America. In Mexico, high ticket prices have put the company out of reach for most Mexicans and meant that audiences are mostly made up of foreigners, but still the Ballet Folklorico has become an institution.

“Amalia Hernandez has spread Mexican dance throughout the world, and she has done what all commercial choreographers of folk dance do, which is to make local dances understandable to all types of spectators,” says Alberto Dallal, author of “The Mexican Dance Hall” and a leading authority on Mexican dance. “She is indisputably one of the most important figures in the world of Mexican dance.”

Although Hernandez says the intent of her show is not to preserve folklore, she nonetheless defends her adaptations of traditional dances, arguing that folklore evolves naturally and that native dances are altered even by the peasants and Indians who create them.

“Folklore all over the world is alive and influenced by its changing surroundings,” she says. “The Indian masks and dances of Oaxaca satirize the Europeans from the court of Maximilian . . . . Nine years ago in Zacatecas, I discovered they had added the Red Cross to their clown dance. The Cuadrillas (dancers) of Tlaxcala now mime rock ‘n’ roll.”

The company repertory reflects different eras of Mexican history, from pre-Hispanic Indian culture, through the Spanish conquest, to the Mexican Revolution. The costumes, based on native dress, are amplified and designed for the stage rather than the town square. The sets are modern, as is much of the dance.

Hernandez herself is at once elegant and theatrical with white hair pulled back to set off high cheekbones. Her eyebrows are drawn in arches, her deep-set eyes shadowed in blue-gray; she sits erect in a white skirt and shawl that belie her 70 years and talks of yoga, meditation and the “spirits” she hopes to portray in her newest dance project.

She is both gentle and arrogant. Surveying her dancers and the trunkloads of costumes awaiting shipment to Los Angeles, Hernandez says she feels like the Aztec Goddess Cuatlique, Mother of the Earth. She says God endowed her with the gift of dance as a young girl, and then endowed her two daughters.

“God gave me this mission. He said you’re going to dance and I give you this talent,” she says.

Hernandez studied with Sybine of Pavlova’s company, Madame Dambre of the Paris Opera, and the American modern dancer Waldseen before forming her own small company in 1952.

Over nearly a decade, the company evolved into the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico and made its international reputation in 1961, winning first prize at the Paris Festival of Nations. Hernandez stopped dancing about 20 years ago to dedicate herself full-time to directing and choreography.

Today, she maintains two active companies of about 150 performers each, a traveling company and a resident company that performs regularly at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The company also tours the Mexican provinces.

Hernandez oversees the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico school, with about 400 students enrolled at a given time and summer sessions for foreigners. Like most artistic companies in Mexico, the company and school are subsidized by the government, through the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes.

Hernandez’s younger daughter, 27-year-old Viviana, is the lead dancer and teacher. Her elder daughter, Norma, is artistic and administrative director of the ballet; her grandson does scheduling for the traveling company.

Hernandez’s supporters say one of her greatest strengths has been the ability to build a stable institution that never fell prey to political changes.

“She formed the most important commercial dance company in the country and has been a model of organization,” says Dallal, who also reveals Hernandez has brought foreign teachers of classic and modern dance to Mexico and helped train some of Mexico’s contemporary choreographers such as Jorge Dominguez, choreographer of the dance troupe, Cuerpo Mutable.

But Dallal criticizes Hernandez and the government for their failure to dedicate funds to research on native dance.

However, contrary to what her critics charge, Hernandez insists she does in-depth research before creating a dance. She says she attends religious festivals, films and photographs local dances and analyzes their movements at length before building from them. She worked for three years on the Ballet Maya, one of her best known dances, she says.

Hernandez also gathers inspiration from yoga and meditation. She says she studied at the Family of Light monastery in Cuernavaca three years ago, before that yoga center moved to Houston. Now she is combining yoga and folklore to create a new dance on nahuales --human and animal spirits.

“If you talk to a brujo , a witch, he will tell you that everything--a mountain or river or corn--has a spirit. That is the same as is taught in yoga. The brujos invoke the spirits and bring them to Earth. We cannot see the spirits because their vibrations are too rapid for our eyes. Only human beings who are ‘Dons’ can see them,” she says.

Hernandez says the dance in progress is one of the most difficult she has ever attempted.

“(Mexican painter Rufino) Tamayo painted spirits as colored dogs. But it is not easy to manage supernatural forces and spirits in theater,” Hernandez says. “I have never taken drugs, although those who do say things lose their perspective, their concrete forms. Leaves breathe and cells can be seen in movement.

“I have not found a way to do this yet. But for those who accuse me of not being authentic, I can say that I am not going to take drugs to do this.”