Amalia Hernandez, Reinventer of Traditions

It’s hard to remember a time when Mexican folk dance wasn’t defined in our minds and those of her countrymen by Ballet Folklorico founder-director Amalia Hernandez. All over Mexico, for example, you can buy sculptures of Yaqui deer dancers, but they are always her transformed vision of antique tribal tradition: noble, naked, balletic--an Apollo with antlers.

Hernandez created this image 41 years ago from a compellingly feral, low-to-the-ground Yaqui ritual that looks nothing like the “Danza del Venado” that her company dances. But her re-imagined choreography has now become something of a symbol for all Mexican folk culture. Along with many of Hernandez’s other creations, it has acquired a life of its own, copied by choreographers who wouldn’t know a Yaqui from a Yankee and added to as if it represented an evolving national heritage. I saw a version in the Yucatan seven years ago with a Phoenix finale: a new deer arising from the dead body of its predecessor. She caught the imagination of everyone.

On Saturday, Hernandez died at age 83 of a respiratory ailment in Mexico City, leaving behind a company as her monument, a blood-dynasty as its protection and all those living symbols as her passport to immortality. But most of all she left behind a pioneering and still controversial concept of the theatricalization of folk resources.

She once described studying anthology and pre-Hispanic art, but “realized that not only did I have to study all of this, I had to live it, to make it mine, so that later, in the moment of creation, this would become something that was not coldly intellectual, but something full of life.”

Trained in classical ballet, she used its resources to expand and develop folk material into theatrical suites, never pretending to honor “authenticity” as a god, but rather her own instincts as an artist. And this approach infuriated purists while influencing audiences and other artists around the world to think about Mexico differently.

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Sitting in the Seoul offices of the National Dance Company of Korea 17 years ago, I heard the artistic and administrative directors speak with wonder of the variety and splendor of Mexican dance--Hernandez’s Mexican dance. And along with other folk-dance pioneers such as Russia’s Igor Moiseyev (also trained in ballet), her vision spread with every tour by her company, and has prevailed through the end of the century.

Think of her as one of the great Mexican muralists who used folk motifs in their art. The motifs can be recognized and researched regarding their points of origin, but the result belongs to the muralists, not the source cultures.

A gracious, cultured woman with a handsome family, Hernandez enjoyed pointing out that some of her choreographic innovations had crept into so-called “authentic” folklore--that living traditions evolve, and she represented one factor in the growth of Mexican culture. Indeed, it’s easiest to criticize her for letting Ballet Folklorico stay in one place creatively for the last two decades, essentially touring the same program with the addition of a new 10-minute work (and the subtraction of an older piece) each year.

Before 1978, for instance, U.S. audiences never saw her Veracruz suite; afterward, however, it became entrenched as the finale of Act 1, with a suite from Jalisco always the finale of Act 2.

One could argue that you should never try to improve perfection--but also that the job of running the Ballet Folklorico empire absorbed her more than exploring the new horizons of theatricalized folklore that began to emerge in response to (and sometime rebellion against) the kind of art and institutions she and Moiseyev had founded. That’s our loss--and also hers.

Ultimately, Ballet Folklorico de Mexico represents a dream of Mexican culture, and those artists who can put their dreams on a stage and make audiences believe them deserve every honor this grim, greedy little world can bestow. Amalia Hernandez lived a long, productive life, and it is her triumph that her dreams will outlive her and probably all of us as well.