Wednesday, October 14, 2009

DANCING ICON OF THE WORLD

By Wilhelmina S. Orozco



Dancing for 25 years is no joke especially when it is ballet. Lisa Macuja-Elizalde the prima ballerina and creator of Ballet Manila (BM) celebrated her anniversary with a grand program showcasing the highlights of her ballet dancing from year 1984 when she graduated from the Russian Ballet Academy to the present.



Way back in the 70’s classical ballet was considered dance for the elite, as lessons were expensive and most of the students belonged to the middle and upper classes. Moreover, it was regarded as colonial since its roots are European, with the costumes very much un-Filipino, the tutus showing the legs, albeit stockinged, and the arms of female dancers in open display. Yet ballet was viewed as a high form of dance, compared to the rock and roll and boogie-woogie steps in vogue then. It was also considered a great ambition of dancers to study ballet in foreign countries, or to join international companies as the audience was not readily available then.



But today, through the efforts of Lisa, ballet has been introduced to the youth, especially students from public schools who are given free entrance most of the time or reduced rates of tickets in order to savor a story that has literary qualities through dance and music, and with a story.



Lisa’s story of 25 years is unfolded through screen projections of her pictures and videos together with her family, beginning with her as a toddler and then being trained to dance ballet here and in Russia. The images are well designed, not cut-and-dried projection but rather dancing on screen as well, dissolving and shifting positions as they contain Lisa dancing different characters upon her graduation from the famous Leningrad’s Vaganova Choreographic Institute in famous plays like The Nutcracker Suite, Don Quixote, and Carmen, among others, then segueing to her onstage dancing excerpts from them. Then when Lisa is on stage, the screen turns into scenes of nature, snowflakes falling on the mountains, a lake with moving swans, silhouetted trees where red petals fall, or an English scenery of that Balcony in Romeo and Juliet. Other projections include only the black and white images of pointed toes shifting from left to right, upper and lower screens.



What made ballet an easy field for Lisa is her what she calls her “deep love for the classics.” The classics would be those stories that contain complicated plots and relationships among characters which require intelligent reading as well. Translated as dance libretto, these classics would prove to be especially difficult, because instead of words, the ideas in them have to be translated physically, through dance, costumes, sets, and music – in other words, a realization of the stories onstage.



How did Lisa make ballet an appreciated art in the country? In the 80’s she dreamed of popularizing ballet, of having a wider audience. She wanted “visibility in media.” So she immersed herself in various public appearances -on TV shows, pop concerts and lately even malls. She even appeared in a print ad showing her leaping with a split. She also danced ballet to pop tunes familiar to the ears of the TV audience thus imprinting her presence, and of course her personality in their minds. Her winning ways – not looking tired after dancing, of always smiling and not showing any airs at all of being in a high class dance field, captured the hearts and minds of the public who then gathered that ballet is after all an easy and a happy field, and therefore worthwhile watching.



Eventually, she grew tired of these kinds of public exposure and so turned to more serious endeavors, that of putting up a ballet studio and a theatre where she could present the plays that she wants to be produced.



Perfect form

As a dancer, Lisa exhibits that perfect form and exact timing of steps that are sometimes too unbelievable for a petite female dancer to possess. Her movements shift without jagged lines, whether starting on toes, coming down on the floor and then leaping up to the arms of a male dancer. In one adagio, she is carried on the shoulders of one who then twirls her from his left to right shoulders and back as if she were just a plate being shifted around. In another scene she is brought up by male dancers on their shoulders and then in another, she reaches to her lover in the scene tumbling down and then with her legs on air they move together to hint at lovemaking. The most breathtaking steps that she takes are those pirouettes done 8 to 30 times on toes and even moving from one end of the stage to the other without her showing any ounce of dizziness. (These spinning steps earned her lots of applause from the audience of that presentation on October 11, 2009) In all these, Lisa appears like a feather leaping, flying, soaring, and being held by sensitive hands. Her toes falling on the floor is hardly heard nor does it create noise that could distract the attention of the audience from the story of the dance.



Now what makes Lisa a consummate artist? One can glean this from the small steps and movements that she takes to those of leaps and bounces as she dances with a male dancer or several groups. Lisa’s Carmen is full of love and sensuality, apart from her wearing a black negligee with her half-bare lover. The twist of her hip to the left indicates her sexy bearing hinting at her profession as a prostitute. In her solo dancing of an Original Pilipino Music or OPM, Lisa is able to show the angst, the hankering for involvement to the tune of “Somewhere in Time” played on the violin by Robert Atchison. She projects her desire for company in the way she wraps her arms around her body and then by the way her arms would flail in the air a few times revealing the emptiness of being without her lover yet also bearing that unrequited or requited love. She also projects that hesitancy to ask her absent lover to return in her movements showing one foot stepping forward and then back, and then the motion repeated, as if wanting and not wanting in the song “Sana’y Maulit Muli.” In all her dances, Lisa is able to present the whole gamut of human emotions from happiness (as Odine in Swan Lake), to sadness (OPM songs) to longing (as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet) and even sensual feelings (as Carmen).



Then all the other ingredients of the presentation are well chosen, from the costumes, to the screen settings, and even the souvenir program which contains not only the briefs about the dancers and guest teachers like Tatiana Udalenkova of the Russian Ballet Academy, St. Petersburg, Russia, who has come to the country to give ballet lessons at BM, and Rober Atchison, English violinist who played touching the classical and OPM music to which Lisa danced, Luz Fernandez, the Lola Basyang of radio, Gia Macuja who has acted lead roles of Nala, in The Lion King, and Gigi and Ellen in Miss Saigon, both presented in England, and other individuals who contributed to the success of the presentation. The generous spaces devoted to the artists’ biography, no matter how brief, reflect the high regard of BM to them, an aim that is worthwhile copying by every cultural presentation.



The culminating points of the anniversary show Lisa and her lover in the play, Prinsipe ng Mga Ibon, based on the story by Severino Reyes retold by Christine Bellen, and illustrated by Panch Alcaraz, standing on a box that flies from the stage to the back of the theatre with the song “Lipad” composed by Jesse Lasaten. A little later, she emerges from the same but now dressed all white and coming down as if flying to be with all the dancers on stage. There Lisa draws a standing ovation from the audience who clapped seemingly without end and stopped only when the curtains fell onstage.



Yet, Lisa is also aware of the travails of her profession, where creeping age can cramp the style and eventually deaden the dancer’s artistic aspirations. She gives this reason for being on top of her field: “One of the reasons I was able to maintain my active career in dancing is that I have a very strong constitution. I rarely get sick…get injured. I have maintained my body and a lot of it has to do with the ballet classes I take, and the training I had with the Vaganova method which begins with 1 ½ hours of strong technical combinations and steps.”



Actually her strength and perseverance are extraordinary as exhibited very well when she danced Swan Lake in Cuba after only a week of rehearsal under the direction of Alicia Alonzo. Then, in this particular presentation, she showed great stamina, dancing from scene to scene, changing costumes, getting into the emotional make-up of every character that she is supposed to portray, within 3 hours of the program. Viewing her is being with someone with a great muscle strength, strong respiratory system and a really deep love of dance and theatre, firstly, as an aesthetic endeavor and secondly, as a profession.



The repertoire of Ballet Manila include full length performances of Swan Lake, Don Quixote, The Nutcracker, Giselle, La Bayadere, Romeo and Juliet, Carmen, Le Corsaire, and “contemporary Filipino ballet pieces by some of the country’s most distinguished choreographers.” This makes the assertion of Lisa that Ballet Manila is the only Filipino company that can “capably stage a full classical repertoire in any given concert season.”



Discipline and blessings of having a supportive family and her own company have made Lisa what she is now. Her company has all the necessary facilities needed to support any production, from rehearsal studios, to ballet books and video as well as music library, a warehouse for costumes and equipment, living quarters, and of course, the administrative, logistics and marketing staff. The environment is there for any dancer to make use of to deepen one’s understanding of any role to be played and danced.



In turn Lisa shares her success by giving scholarships, free ballet education to public elementary and high school students under the Ballet Manila School. She also has directed the Artists’ Welfare Project Inc., an NGO that “guarantees welfare benefits to all its artist-members.”



Truly, the country has a gem of a dancer in Lisa, the best that the country has produced in the whole history of dance. She exhibits not only a firm grasp of the ballet techniques but also a deep understanding of the meaning of every story that is presented, every line of a song that accompanies her dance, a real “storyteller on toes,” (as Lisa would say of her company, Ballet Manila). She has shown that the Filipina dancer can excel and even garner international acclaim given proper training and in her case, Russian training, as well as preserving her roots as a Filipina. That ability to put emotions into her dances is a product of her being a “kababayan” as we are known to be sensitive to feelings and thoughts, our own and those of others’. Lisa credits her husband Fred Elizalde of being a strong pillar in her ascent to success as she expressed in her Sunday radio program over DZRH while being interviewed by Ruth Abao, “In fact I would classify my life as a dancer in this way ‘before and after Fred.” The latter has given her his wholehearted and financial support for her to give expression to her dancing talents and abilities as well as her director capabilities. Yet, despite her being onstage most of the time, she remains a devoted mother to their children and a grateful wife which she always showed by thanking Fred who happens to sit among the audience every time she plays.



Osias Barroso, BM Artistic Associate and Ballet Master, says it all, Lisa is the “ ‘Ballerina of the People’ who will dance anywhere as long as there’s a floor for her to dance on.”



Maybe there is really something about dreaming that can make an individual reach the highest of heights of success. Let us add to the accolades, Lisa is also the “Ballet Icon Dancer of the World.”



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