Mexican rhythm, ‘Riverdance’ style

IT’S close to midnight when British-born dance director Richard O’Neal finally confides his fears about the risky career gamble that brought him to this ancient mountain town in southern Mexico.

Almost five years ago, O’Neal gave up his job as the globe-trotting assistant director of “Riverdance,” the popular stage show based on Irish folk dance. Unexpectedly, he was offered the chance to launch a Mexican version of the show to be based on the rousing, foot-stomping dance style known as son jarocho, native to the southern state of Veracruz.

The invitation had come from a powerful, highly placed fan of “Riverdance,” then-Veracruz Gov. Miguel Aleman Velasco. The politician had seen the need for a first-class theatrical spectacle that would do for jarocho music what “Riverdance” had done for the Irish jig. And Aleman held the cultural purse strings to make it happen.

O’Neal didn’t seem like the most likely candidate. He had never even heard of son jarocho. He knew almost no Spanish. And when he was told he’d have to move to Xalapa, the drizzly capital of Veracruz, he wondered, “Where’s Xalapa?”

The dancer would quickly discover just how far he had come from Coventry, the English town where he was raised by immigrant West Indian parents, studied ballet as a child and developed a love for musical theater.

In Xalapa, a stop for Spanish invaders on their way to conquer Mexico City, O’Neal was immediately branded a cultural interloper. To jarocho purists, this stranger with the corn rows and refined British accent had no business coming here to tinker with their tradition and try to change an art form that had existed just fine without him for generations.

Despite the naysayers, O’Neal managed to launch a local dance company he simply called Jarocho, a term that applies to this tropical region, its people and their culture, a rootsy blend of European, African and Indian influences. The flashy show, also called “Jarocho,” does exactly what critics charged: It offers a modern twist on cultural traditions filtered through an outsider’s perspective. (In one segment, the dancers even line up shoulder to shoulder in that iconic “Riverdance” formation, but they’re doing a zapateado, a traditional jarocho step.)

“Jarocho corrupcion!” exclaimed one local newspaper.

Today, O’Neal’s show is at a crossroads. The production’s first-world ambitions have hit a wall of third-world limitations. Aleman, his original patron, is no longer in office. The $1 million he got from the state government to start the company is long gone. The show is now largely self-sufficient but falls short of resources it needs to grow.

To go beyond mere survival, O’Neal says, “Jarocho” now needs to go beyond its current boundaries, both geographic and artistic. Mexico, after all, offers limited demand for such a stage spectacular. Here, audiences, budgets, staffing and morale are always dancing on the edge of collapse. Meanwhile, critics keep questioning whether the state-run University of Veracruz, where the company is headquartered, couldn’t find better use for scarce education resources.

O’Neal maintains a perfect dancer’s posture as he assesses his circumstances. He’s been sitting ramrod straight in a wooden chair for 45 minutes without fidgeting or shuffling, a sign of the discipline he brings to his mission.

His only hope is to take the show on the road. “I need to get it out there as soon as possible,” says O’Neal, who would soon be hop-scotching European capitals in a last-ditch campaign to book his 55-person traveling troupe at international dance festivals for the 2007 season. “If it doesn’t go, it’s going to die.”

In his quest to take “Jarocho” international, O’Neal finds himself retracing the early steps taken by “Riverdance,” which also faced initial opposition from Ireland’s cultural purists.

“Once it was out there making money and bringing tourism into Ireland, people were very proud of it,” says O’Neal, 34. “Now, when people say ‘Ireland,’ they think Guinness or ‘Riverdance.’ So that’s what I’m waiting for. I’m waiting for ‘Jarocho’ to go out and come back, and then people hopefully will understand.”

Making a profit is part of the challenge. So far, the show is able to repay the $350,000 annual subsidy it gets from the university but is unable to keep its dancers and musicians employed year-round.

“Richard, as an artist and as a human being, is tested constantly by these pressures,” says Javier Bryan Sanchez, a Mexican American who conceived “Jarocho’s” stylish graphic design. “I know he’s reconsidered his position. There are so many other things he could be doing, he’s such a talented man. He’s definitely investing everything he has to give this show the life we all believe it has the potential of having.”

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A ready adaptability

TREADING softly on the hilly streets of Xalapa, O’Neal heads to a favorite cafe for breakfast the following morning. He walks with a light and graceful step, as if he is almost gliding. He has the gingerly presence of a respectful visitor who doesn’t want to disturb the way things are.

Still, O’Neal can’t avoid being noticed. He’s one of the few black people living here. Not that the locals stare at the quietly charismatic foreigner. He has a way of both standing out and fitting in. It’s a type of adaptability that comes natural to immigrants.

Showing off the fluid Spanish he’s learned in a short time, O’Neal orders a specialty coffee drink with banana liqueur. Upbeat and talkative, he recounts how his parents moved from the Caribbean isle of St. Vincent to Britain to take jobs that were meant to be temporary, his mother as a midwife, his father as telephone company worker. They never went back.

Despite his working-class background, O’Neal enjoyed a genteel upbringing in Coventry. His love for dance and theater was awakened at an early age with traditional schooling that stressed “discipline, hard work and good manners.” Theater performances were also part of the curriculum, and O’Neal learned skills there that would later help him as a dance company director who must grasp all aspects of a production.

“It didn’t matter ... whether you were the lead or you were in the chorus, you were in every rehearsal,” he recalled with a fond chuckle. “So you saw the whole process as it all came together.”

In 1990 at age 18, O’Neal moved to London with hopes of breaking into the city’s highly competitive West End theater scene. He got a job making fries at McDonald’s and enrolled at the London Studio Center, a high-powered performing arts school “straight out of ‘Fame.’ ” It was an intimidating place for a provincial boy. “When I walked in, I was scared,” he says.

His first big role was in a West End production of the Gershwin musical “Crazy for You.” The play is about a Broadway dancer who moves west to a dusty mining town with an abandoned theater and, O’Neal recalls, “eventually ends up creating a show out of nothing, under the worst conditions possible.”

As he spoke, O’Neal was struck by how his new life was imitating his old art. “Hmmmm,” he mused with a smile. “Very close to home.”

His big career break came when he landed a role as one of a trio of tap dancers in “Riverdance.” Eventually, O’Neal was made assistant director and assigned to take charge of the Broadway cast members who were bored, unmotivated and homesick after months on the road. It would be his job to get them excited again. He would have to become part boss, part coach, part counselor, part confidant.

As a former dancer, “I could put myself in their shoes. I knew what was happening backstage. I knew what they enjoyed. I knew what they hated. I knew how they felt about each other. So I sort of used that to help bring everybody together.” It was an intimate management style he would apply again with “Jarocho.”

O’Neal was in a cab heading to a “Riverdance” performance in Washington, D.C., when he learned of the Mexican proposal from Julian Erskine, the show’s senior executive producer. “Richard,” the producer said, “there’s this group somewhere called Ha-lah-pah that is interested in doing something like us. Now, they don’t have anything prepared and they’re not really sure what they want, but they need somebody to go have a look.”

The project was even more off-the-cuff than Erskine had made it sound. O’Neal now smiles when he relates how -- as he later learned -- Aleman came up with the concept.

“One day he [Aleman] was at a dinner party making everybody watch ‘Riverdance,’ and he decided to turn down the music on the television and play son jarocho,” O’Neal recalled, and after a while, “he said, ‘Look, why don’t we do this?’ ”

The governor assigned the task to Victor Arredondo, then president of the University of Veracruz, the city’s cultural epicenter and major source of arts funding.

“Get me someone here from ‘Riverdance,’ ” Aleman commanded.

Ten days after that chat with his boss in the cab, O’Neal was on a plane to Mexico. It was October 2001.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” O’Neal said. “I thought, ‘I’ll go have a look. Let’s see what comes out of this.’ ”

Two years later, “Jarocho” was born. Like “Riverdance,” which also features flamenco and tap segments, “Jarocho” explores styles beyond son jarocho. One of the most innovative and thrilling moments involves a choreographed competition between flamenco and Afro-Cuban dancers, revealing the similarities in their seemingly diverse rhythms.

When it debuted in March 2003 at a local festival at the Indian ruins in Tajin, onlookers included Aleman and other culture mavens. They were there “to give the thumbs-up or the ‘get out,’ ” O’Neal jokes. The crowd watched silently at first, he recalls, not quite knowing what to make of it. Then they clapped their approval, as if it took a while for the new work to sink in.

Since then, he has won over skeptics and wowed audiences in almost 100 performances throughout Mexico. Newspaper critics raved when it debuted in Mexico City two years ago. Excelsior called it one of Mexico’s “most ambitious and original cultural projects.” The Economist said the show was a surprise that leaves its audience “pleasantly captivated.”

Yet hard-core critics are as passionate as ever in their opposition. One of the most vocal is one of the genre’s leading exponents, guitarist and composer Ramon Gutierrez Hernandez, director of Xalapa’s acclaimed son jarocho ensemble, Son de Madera.

Gutierrez dismisses O’Neal’s production as a “Yankee spectacle.” “I didn’t want to have anything to do with that atrocity, with that ferocious way of commercializing what doesn’t belong to you,” Gutierrez explains in Spanish. “Why would we want them to promote our culture if they are the ones who will benefit from what is ours? That is called ‘usurpaje.’ ”

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Taking the music back

TO understand the intensity of O’Neal’s opposition, it helps to understand a bit of the history of son jarocho, a dynamic style which came close to extinction, or at least irrelevance, in the last century.

Son jarocho was cultivated more than two centuries ago in the melange of cultures that flowed through the port of Veracruz -- Spanish melodies and verses, flamenco footwork, African polyrhythm and Native American vocal inflections. It remained a rural, regional style until the early 20th century when it started to gain national popularity with the advent of recorded sound.

In the mid-1900s, the music had become commercialized, a tourist attraction as cliched as a hula dance in Hawaii. Politicians co-opted the style as a symbol of national pride, like a mariachi hat. The genre’s prototypical song, “La Bamba,” was even used as a campaign song for the man who would become president in 1946, Miguel Aleman Valdes, father of the Veracruz governor who recruited O’Neal.

That political connection was a source of suspicion for musicians who have been leading a jarocho revival in Veracruz since the 1970s. Spearheaded by groups such as Son de Madera and Mono Blanco, they have labored to take back the music from the politicians and the tourist traps. They even have a derisive term for the trite groups in white folkloric outfits that commonly play at seafood restaurants -- marisqueros, “the fishy ones.”

The musicians committed to genuine son jarocho were understandably wary of an outsider overtly trying to commercialize their music, especially one with government backing.

The cultural tension between purists and progressives rings all too familiar to “Riverdance” veterans like Erskine.

“Exactly the same thing happened with ‘Riverdance,’ ” says the Dublin-based producer. “People thought this was meddling with tradition, this was going to kill it off, this was the death knell of Irish music and Irish dance. The reality was, rather than being the death knell, it was the shot in the arm that it needed.”

“Riverdance” made Irish culture accessible and even sexy, says Erskine, who continues to be a mentor to O’Neal. What was once the stale hobby of a few aficionados became a hot global commodity.

When O’Neal arrived here he also found a genre that had become too tradition-bound. Mexican students have always been taught to do the same steps the same way, and every step had a name. The dances, such as la bruja or el colas, were performed with the faithful repetition of a church ritual.

“New steps hadn’t been created in a very, very long time here,” says O’Neal. “So we did some new things.” People might be tempted to call it an Irish-Mexican fusion because O’Neal borrows that famous kick line from “Riverdance.” The problem is, the kick line wasn’t Irish.

“It has become a ‘ “Riverdance” moment,’ ” Erskine says, “but in fact, there’s nothing Irish about it. It’s just pure showbiz.”

Such is the messed-up world of fusions. Jazzing up jarocho should not be considered an offense, says O’Neal, who also added drums and a hip beat to the traditional ensemble.

“With ‘Jarocho,’ we’re not trying to take anything away,” he says. “We’re not trying to say, ‘OK, now, it’s going to be like this.’ We’re just saying, ‘This is a new presentation of something old. The old will never change and will always be there.’ We’re just doing new interpretations of something old. And I hope, if it’s commercially successful, it will bring a lot more people here to see the real thing.”

O’Neal admits he’s been bewitched by the magic of his adopted homeland, “which will always be a part of my heart now.” He’s also found romance here with his lead dancer, Vanessa Guevara.

But how long can he hold out for “Jarocho”?

After a meeting in Germany with dance promoters who showed interest in bringing the show to Europe, O’Neal considered the question during a phone call.

“It’s now or never,” he said.

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