A quiet riot of Cuban ballet

Dancing to recorded music is almost always an unfortunate compromise, but on Saturday it led to disaster -- and triumph -- at the 19th International Havana Ballet Festival.

After performing to a defective CD for three sections of the pas de deux from “Le Corsaire,” trying to ignore not only minute-by-minute dropouts but sudden skips forward and back, Alihaydee Carreno of National Ballet of Cuba and Leonardo Reale of the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires elected to dance the finale or coda of the showpiece in utter silence.

Looking relieved and released, Carreno whipped through more fouettes than the music would have allowed. Reale flew through all the bravura steps invented by Mikhail Baryshnikov in the 1970s and Irek Mukhamedov in the 1980s -- and then some. The audience at the Gran Teatro Garcia Lorca exploded in a prolonged standing, stamping, screaming ovation, and the performance became an instant “do-you-remember-when” legend in Cuban ballet.

Grace under pressure has long been a Cuban specialty, and this biennial 10-day festival (ending Nov. 6) provided other examples in the dancing of the National Ballet during the first four nights. Joel Carreno performed five major roles during that period -- including Albrecht in the complete “Giselle” -- almost always matching his exemplary technical prowess with stylistic distinction.

Viengsay Valdes proved forceful in everything from a super glamorous “Dying Swan” to a technically awesome “Pas d’Esclave,” not always right but always overwhelming. Sadaise Arencibia graced the Sunday Balanchine gala with authoritative performances of both the technically fearsome “Agon” pas de deux and the more serene neoclassicism of Terpsichore in the complete “Apollo.”

Meanwhile the phenomenal Rolando Sarabia kept appearing in the most outlandish costumes -- a leopard-skin mantle over iridescent harem pants in one ballet, an overstuffed brassiere in another -- without diminishing the sense that he is the equal of any virtuoso dancer anywhere.

Guests began arriving in force, and Alicia Amatriain of Germany’s Stuttgart Ballet immediately established herself as a major artist with the originality and depth of her Mad Scene in “Giselle” at the National Theater on Friday.

However, some of the visitors came to dance contemporary repertory (mainly short pieces), a choice that gave the festival both discoveries and disappointments.

No new work seemed more pertinent than George Cespedes’ quartet “The Equation” at the Teatro Mella on Sunday. Performed in and around a large, open, free-standing cube, it showed the dancers waiting for their turn inside, then fighting one another for space and finally breaking out toward the forestage, with one of them collapsing en route and everyone remaining fearful at the end.

Compelling as a movement abstraction, the work became especially relevant -- and daring -- if you thought of Cuba as the cube....

Former Stuttgart Ballet star Marcia Haydee brought two dancers from Santiago’s Ballet del Teatro Municipal to the Mella on Sunday for her extended “Carmen” showpiece rich in psychological nuance and dramatic power, plus the rarity of showing a woman in control of every impulse or move in a pas de deux.

Performed Friday at the Mella by the Centro Coreografico de Valencia, Patrick de Bana’s hourlong, modern-dance ensemble piece “Aman” conveyed such a liberating feeling of physical freedom that it didn’t much matter that the choreography remained wholly unreadable: a private meditation on the aftermath of the Homeric love between Ulysses and Penelope.

National Ballet of Cuba danced the lion’s share of contemporary works, including Jorge Amarante’s septet “Meeting Point,” winner of an important competition awarded every two years for Iberian-American choreography. Amarante’s steps looked ordinary, but the manipulation of small tables on wheels led to a number of striking configurations. Even better: the windblown arm movements that seemed to lift and carry the dancers’ bodies into new experiences and relationships.

Introduced at the Lorca on Sunday, Rafael del Prado’s “Images by Dali” created a delirious spectacle from a pileup of Surrealist artifacts and choreographic cliches. Sarabia, Alihaydee Carreno and boy wonder Alejandro Virelles danced brilliantly -- when you could find them in the melee -- but why this expensive charade was placed midway through the Balanchine gala remains one of the mysteries of Cuban culture.

No less than four contemporary works at the Lorca in the first four days belonged to company founder / director and resident living legend Alicia Alonso. “Verbum” (Friday) represented a genuine modernist order-out-of-chaos experiment, and “In the Shade of a Waltz” (Saturday) a dreamlike, highly exportable showpiece.

However both “Abandoned Dido” (Friday) and “The Magic Flute” (Saturday) seemed essentially teaching tools: evocations of long-lost story ballets that Alonso created to give her company and audience a deeper perspective on dance history. Whether you found them entertaining novelties or passe indulgences, they heightened the continuity of ballet tradition that the whole festival strongly exemplifies.