The Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s choreographic output from the 1960s and 70s illustrates how anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s influential theory of transculturation informed the Cuban Revolution’s cultural policy and institutional discourse on dance. Titles such as Alberto Alonso’s Carmen (1967) and Alberto Méndez’s Ad libitum (1978) integrated ballet, Africanisms and Spanish elements through choreographic strategies of fusion, juxtaposition and contrapunteo/counterpoint. This repertoire embodied key Ortizean theses—e.g., the tension between cultural synthesis and heterogeneity, the open-ended formulation of culture as a process rather than a product. However, the Ballet Nacional’s discourse on this choreographic production also reveals how the Ortizean premise that transculturation is perpetual and fueled by never-ending social conflict ultimately stood at odds with the state’s teleological proposition that the Revolution was the concluding chapter in Cuban history, a political regime in which the conflicts at the heart of nation had supposedly ended.  

Lester Tomé is an associate professor at Smith College, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on dance theory. He studies the development of ballet in Cuba in the contexts of early twentieth-century avant-gardism, the Cuban Revolution, and contemporary migration and transnationalism. His research, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center and Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, Cuban Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, among other publications.

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