Equal, but Separate

Lorena Feijoo cannot remember a time when she did not want to be a ballerina.

“Since I was very little I was involved in this world of tutus and pointe shoes,” she says softly.

She remembers, she says, being backstage at the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, where the women who took care of the costumes looked after her while her mother, Lupe Calzadilla, a member of the corps, was dancing out front. One of the reasons her mother traded performing for teaching was that she could not bear to hear her daughter crying backstage.

Her little sister Lorna, 3 1/2 years younger, also longed to dance, but was afraid, because, she says, “I thought I would never be able to be like my sister. She was so good, and she won a lot of prizes and contests. So I was a little afraid that I would never be able to be like her.”

Lorna thought she might study modern dance instead, but found herself powerfully drawn to ballet. “Don’t do it to be like your sister,” her mother warned her. “Do it for yourself.”

“My mother never wanted us to compare ourselves to each other,” says Lorena. “She would tell us we were like flowers, and all the flowers are beautiful in their own way. You can be like a rose, and she can be like an orchid, and you smell and look different. Some people like the orchid better, some the rose.”

These days, Lorna, 24, would be a tropical orchid, a celebrated leading ballerina with the National Ballet of Cuba, founded and still directed by the legendary Alicia Alonso and one of Cuba’s most beloved and strongly backed cultural institutions. She danced the lead in “Cinderella” with that company in Orange County last season, and she will be back with it in February dancing the title role in “Giselle.”

Her big sister Lorena, 28, however, would be a northern rose. A principal dancer, also acclaimed, with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, she left Cuba in 1991 for the nomadic life of an independent ballerina in the West. This week, she dances the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy in the Joffrey’s “Nutcracker” on the opening and closing nights of its four-day run at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

As close as their common talent has made them, a combination of choice and circumstance has made the rest of their lives very different. Like so many Cuban family stories, theirs is a tale of separation, of lives formed in some essential part by the choice to stay in Cuba or to leave it.

Whatever the distance that separates them, the Feijoo sisters remain close. They talk on the phone frequently and see each other whenever their schedules allow. Perhaps never having danced professionally in the same company (or even the same country) has kept any rivalry out of their relationship, but they have never, they both insist, been competitive.

“No, that is something that other people are always thinking. But I admire her a lot, and she admires me in the same way,” says Lorna.

Asked to describe each other, both struggle for words.

“We’re the same, but very different at the same time. She has her personality, and I have mine,” says Lorna from the National Ballet’s offices in humid, sunny Havana. “But we both really wanted to dance, we both enjoy it so much, and we’ve both sacrificed so much for what we want.”

“Onstage we look very different, but there are certain gestures where we really seem the same,” says Lorena, from her apartment in cold Chicago. “I think she is a very fiery dancer--and I think I am more lyrical, but then people say I am fiery. So I don’t know.”

They do look alike, though Lorena is a little taller; they even sound alike. Both are exceptional dancers.

“Blazing virtuosity” is how Times dance critic Lewis Segal described Lorna’s performance in the title role of the National Ballet’s “Cinderella” in January. Critics in New York, London and Spain have also praised the younger Feijoo as extraordinary--”a ballerina with a grand manner,” “beautiful and elegant,” “the best of the Cubans . . . a gem.”

Lorena’s reviews are also impressive. “A virtuoso . . . lyrical [with] a vital sense of drama,” wrote Ballet 2000 magazine. “She is a really strong, beautiful, expressive dancer with real fluidity and ease onstage,” says Sid Smith, who covers dance for the Chicago Tribune. “She is very seductive, an expressive actress with real star firepower. The first time I saw her [in “The Nutcracker” in 1995], she just blew me away.”

“They are both very strong in their own way,” says their mother, who is in her mid-50s and now lives and teaches ballet in Paraguay. (Their father, Jose Lorenzo Feijoo, an actor, has lived in Mexico for 10 years.)

Calzadilla can take much of the credit for that strength. When they were young, she admits, she was their severest critic, but she purposefully left their training to other dancers in the Cuban system. Then, if one of them came running with a problem with a teacher, Calzadilla remembers, “I would tell them, well, you must have done something. I wanted them to find out that whatever they achieved came through their own work, that it was neither more nor less than what they deserved.”

If the Feijoos’ achievements are attributable to their mother’s disciplined approach, they are also certainly a product of the depth and quality of the training at the National Ballet’s school. But ultimately even their mother credits the rare coincidence of shared talent.

“I remember once Fernando Alonso [Alicia’s first husband, also integral in forming the National Ballet] told my mother, ‘You should have kept having babies, then we’d have had the best company in the world,’ ” Lorena remembers.

“If I read this in a magazine, I would tell you it’s a lie,” says Calzadilla. “I don’t know how to explain it. But it comes from them, from the way they were formed when they were little. It gives me a happiness, a pride that has no limits. It is the greatest pride of my life.”

*

As a little girl, Lorena was quiet, even introverted, reading alone for hours, a perfectionist who couldn’t bear to get less than flawless marks in her classes, endlessly conscientious about her work, always concerned about what others thought.

“My father used to tell me, ‘When you try to be perfect, you can’t be good,’ ” she says. Even now, she says, she sometimes drives her dance partners crazy by analyzing their performances to pieces. At age 4 she was clamoring to go to ballet school. At 9 she entered Alejo Carpentier, Cuba’s elementary-level arts academy, and rapidly stood out; at 13, she won her first ballet competition.

“I was the girl that got to do everything,” she says.

At 18, in 1988, she went into the National Ballet; and after a year or so in the corps she started to do solo and principal roles. But not as often as she hoped. At the time, Alicia Alonso, in her late 60s, was still dancing, as was a generation of older leading ballerinas, and the National Ballet had a particularly rigid hierarchy that worked against rising talent.

By the early ‘90s, a number of talented younger dancers left--with or without Alonso’s blessing--including Rosario Suarez, Jose Manuel Carren~o (Lorena’s frequent partner as a student, now a principal at American Ballet Theatre), Carlos Acosta (now with the Houston and Royal ballets), and Lorena.

“I was afraid that I was going to spend my youth waiting,” she says.

In 1991, Lorena joined a company run by former Joffrey dancer Ann Marie De Angelo in Mexico, then spent two years as a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet of Flanders in Belgium. In 1995 she and her Belgian dancer-boyfriend Steve Beirens came to the U.S. on a contract with the ill-starred Los Angeles Ballet, which disbanded in financial disarray before ever getting onstage. The couple was stranded until De Angelo, by then back in the U.S. and working again with the Joffrey as Gerald Arpino’s associate director, stepped in and offered both of them jobs.

It has been an exciting if somewhat precarious professional life. Lorena has worked with great dancers like Cynthia Gregory, Fernando Bujones and Melissa Hayden; she got a compliment from her childhood idol Gelsey Kirkland; she has been exposed to a wide variety of choreography, albeit mostly the contemporary work the Joffrey specializes in.

“I think I have gained a lot of recognition by dancing all over,” Lorena says. “And a lot of freedom, human freedom, to manage my life. In Cuba they do everything for you all the time. I have met and worked with really wonderful people. You get different things from different places, and I think it makes you grow so much.”

But there is a tinge of regret, too, in Lorena’s voice. “In the States, it’s just getting harder for dance to survive,” she murmurs, after describing Cuban fans who will travel by bicycle for an hour to see a ballet.

And she misses the classics like “Giselle” and “Romeo and Juliet” that make up most of the National Ballet’s repertory. “[A ballerina’s] career is pretty short,” she says. “There are things I would love to do that I think the Joffrey will never do, and I would like to fulfill all my dreams before I stop.”

She holds out some hope that Cuba might be one place where she could get that chance--as a guest artist. Now that the older generation has retired, the company has become much more flexible, with younger dancers in the spotlight and some dancers allowed to accept guest roles in troupes off the island. But the tolerance doesn’t extend to welcoming back expatriates like Lorena.

“I think that people from my generation who left opened the way for people like my sister, because Alicia saw that if she didn’t treat her right, she was going to lose her,” Lorena says. “But at the time I left I think she just couldn’t deal with it. I talked to her about it recently, but she still”--she pauses--”wasn’t ready.”

After seven years outside Cuba there is still a part of her that longs to dance at home. “It would have been great to be able to dance here and dance there,” Lorena says, a little wistfully. “But that kind of relationship was not possible for me.”

*

For Lorna, things seem to have always been simpler. She was the outgoing, happy, audacious child, a willful tomboy as a youngster and a confident flirt as she got older. Unlike her sister, she showed no interest in ballet until she was 10, which was when her mother brought her along as she was helping conduct auditions at the school. Lorna announced that she wanted an application--immediately.

“I didn’t think she would be able to bear the discipline of ballet,” her mother remembers. “But little by little her behavior changed.”

The sisters’ paths as adults seem to have gone in the opposite direction from their childhood characters. It was the circumspect Lorena who upped and left her country and the company that had been her life in dance; while the audacious Lorna has stayed in the relative security of the National Ballet.

Lorna was accepted into the company at age 18. Now 24, she is the youngest and most celebrated of a new generation of leading Cuban ballerinas. In Havana, people are even starting to say that she dances like Alonso in her prime.

She spends most of the year performing with the National Ballet, doing the classics at home and on the company’s increasingly frequent international tours. Her achievements have been rewarded with the opportunity to perform as a guest with companies outside Cuba. At one point the Joffrey offered her a guest contract--which would have been the first time the two sisters were part of the same company--but it was held up by visa paperwork, and she took an offer from the Zurich Opera Ballet instead.

Lorna’s emergence as a star seems well deserved. “She is a technical phenomenon,” says Michael Crabb, who reviews dance for Canada’s National Post and saw her dance at the International Ballet Festival in Havana this fall, where Lorna’s closing pas de deux with Argentine star Maximiliano Guerra inspired screams of adoration and a prolonged standing ovation from the international audience. “I saw her do things where you almost couldn’t believe your eyes.” But he says her gift is not only for pyrotechnics. “She has something very special which could mature into real artistic distinction,” Crabb says. “If she were at American Ballet Theatre I think she would blow most of their ballerinas out of the water.”

At the moment, Lorna, unlike her sister, seems to have no regrets.

“I like dancing everything, but I like the classics best,” she says. “Of course, that’s what dominates in the company, and that’s our best aspect, and so that’s what I do the most. Most companies are doing more contemporary works, and I think we’re the company that is really safeguarding the [classics]. But I like doing them so, so, so much--’Swan Lake,’ ‘Giselle’--my favorites are the ones that have an interpretive, a dramatic aspect.”

Lorna seems serenely confident about the future. She will marry fellow National Ballet member Nelson Madrigal in early January, and she’s looking forward to dancing the role of Giselle in the U.S. in February. She especially hopes she will get the nod for the lead role when the company arrives for its New York City run (actually at the new New Jersey Performing Arts Center). When it’s pointed out that this is Alonso’s most famous role, the brazen child peeks through: “Maybe that’s one reason I’d like to [do it there].”

She would, perhaps, like more association with the rest of the dance world, to dance, for instance, in works by major contemporary choreographers like Jiri Kylian, William Forsythe or Balanchine--works she glimpses mostly on poorly copied videotapes. And, like fellow Cubans Acosta and Carren~o, she’d like to have a more sustained taste of stardom outside the island. But she insists that the National Ballet will always be her home.

“A ballerina always aspires to rise to whatever level she can grasp, but I’d always like to stay here. I’d like to do other things, but I will always come back.”

*

Given their close relationship and equality of their talent, it would seem natural for the sisters to dance together.

“It’s something we’ve always wanted to do,” says Lorna.

But the reality is that distance, not togetherness, is the real challenge they have to grapple with. They juggle astronomical phone bills, make visits on the fly in one country or another. Lorena will travel from the Joffrey’s tour or its home base in Chicago to see her sister dance with the National Ballet in at least one of its U.S. dates. She will also go to Havana later this month, her first trip there in two years, for the holidays and for Lorna’s wedding.

The distance between them makes it hard on the rest of the family as well. Calzadilla traveled to Cuba to see Lorna dance in “Swan Lake” this fall. She wept at her performance as Odile. (“If she made my mother cry, then she really must have been good,” says Lorena.) Calzadilla wept too, after seeing Lorena dance with Acosta in Chile last year--the first time she had seen her eldest daughter dance live in eight years.

Perhaps Calzadilla, more than anyone, would like her daughters to be reunited.

“I would love to see them dance together in Cuba,” she says.

But ultimately that is up to them, and if it does not happen, that will be all right too.

“I brought them up to be strong,” Calzadilla says, “because I wanted them to understand what they wanted from life, in every sense. In their careers, in their personal lives, in their love lives--to know what they wanted and then to do it.”