Carlos

Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet

Lowry has been essential to my career. They’ve been presenting my shows for a very long time, more than a decade, from the Manchester International Festival to Nutcracker in Havana. So for Manchester International Festival, I was still dancing at the Royal Ballet, and Alex Poots invited me to be part of the festival. I performed three ballets in the bill: Apollo, L'après-midi d'un Faune and Suite of Dances.

Then I did a programme there again with the Contemporary Dance Company of Cuba at the Lowry's invitation. Even when I didn't have a company, before Acosta Danza, they still produced my shows. They always took my shows as a dancer and then now as a choreographer and founder of Acosta Danza and director of Birmingham Royal Ballet. So the relationship continues.

Julia Fawcett was instrumental for me to meet Stephen Crocker. Stephen was still working at the Lowry and was just beginning to direct the Norwich Theatre Royal. I carried on that relationship with Stephen and eventually we co-produced my new Nutcracker. So there's many points of encounter that always had the Lowry at the centre. It impacted my career in many different ways.

That's the beauty of it. I think that support gave me a lot of confidence. Whenever I put on a production, the Lowry was always there to take it. And I think that's very, very important for me.

Black Sabbath The Ballet was a huge surprise. It was an outside-of-the box production and there was some scepticism about how well it was going to do. But it turned out to be one of the most popular productions we’ve ever produced. It's a ballet that doesn't particularly tell a story, it’s celebratory to the band, but sells as many tickets as Swan Lake. It’s unheard of for a non-storytelling, three-act ballet to sell that many tickets. Just remarkable. I'm looking forward now for this UK tour to take it to places that we haven't taken it to yet, including Lowry, and to see how the audience will react to it.

We need to bring ballet to new audiences. Ballet was born so long ago, something has to be done to adapt it and to reposition it in a new light. That's the only way that ballet can stay relevant and alive. Otherwise, there will be a very hard competition and tough times ahead for this art form.

We identified that it was the way to go, to try and gain new audiences by cross-branding genres of music, or going into different areas where people normally don't consume ballet. Hence this fusion between heavy metal and ballet. That raised a lot of eyebrows but at the same time a lot of people are going to watch it, because curiosity is always going to be a good thing.

It's just trying to think outside the box so that ballet can still feel fresh. And at the same time, defending those classics, because otherwise we're going to lose them. So it doesn't have to be the end, it's just about adapting and moving on.

As director, I design the artistic agenda. I bring choreographers, I bring artists. I design the way forward artistically and work with the team to help us to deliver this vision. My vision was, again, stay active, bring in new audiences, compete with other companies out there. I see us as being ambassadors of Birmingham, because obviously, it's a project that represents the city of Birmingham and then we just want to open up new markets that normally have been closed for the Birmingham Royal Ballet.

We have been able to take the company to Luxembourg, to Hamburg, to Rotterdam. This summer, we went for the first time to the Kennedy Center in Washington and Japan. We are bringing in new partners along the way, internationally, but also in Birmingham itself. So we have a partnership with the Birmingham Rep. We have a partnership with the University of Birmingham and other institutions.

I don't consider myself a ballet dancer. I discovered ballet later on in my life, because I was always a street dancer. My first form of dance was obviously Cuban dance: salsa, son and all the traditional Cuban dances. From the minute I opened my eyes, my parents were dancing around, the neighbours were dancing around, music pouring from every household. And so that was the first form of dance that I saw.

Then in the 80s, with the whole hip-hop breakdancing movement, where Michael Jackson was the hero of all that. And so I wanted to be a Michael Jackson. By the age of eight or nine years old I was already enrolled into this breakdancing club where we would go and break battle with the other clubs and I was spinning on my head. That was my upbringing. That was me. 

Ballet arrived to my life because my father saw that I was running into a life of petty crime. I didn't like school particularly, and so it was a way of giving me discipline, because ballet is all about discipline.

So even from the beginning of my trajectory, you can see I have so many interests, so many tastes. By the time I was 30, I began to choreograph, I began to write books. I began to look into the future, collaborating with different choreographers, contemporary ones, because I felt the need to keep evolving and growing. While I was dancing Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet, all this classical repertory, I was also having a career as a contemporary dancer parallel to that.

When I finally retired from the Royal Ballet in 2015 I carried on as a contemporary dancer, founding my Cuban company Acosta Danza where I perform with them in every show, doing cameo appearances, but more as a contemporary dancer.

So when the Birmingham Royal Ballet offer came my way, I brought to the company all of this taste and all of this curiosity, and that's reflected in the way I programme. I could programme classical ballets like Don Quixote, which this company didn't have, but at the same time be bold enough to create a cross-branded ballet like Black Sabbath and other contemporary ballet. So I think the range of my taste is represented in the way I programme.

An artist needs to keep going forward, keep asking questions and keep satisfying their curiosity. This is how artists live. They are never satisfied. And you know, there are so many ways a dancer can evolve. You could be a ballet dancer and evolve into choreography, or write, or become a lighting designer. Just seeking all the ways to communicate with an audience.

I think if you're really an artist in your core, you're always going keep moving and evolving, and there's going to be a point where you're not satisfied with what you got, and then you want more, you want to go into different pathways. To keep that spirit alive is essential for any artist.

Performing is an introspective journey. It's about you, your thoughts, your body, you and your space and connecting with an audience. It's trying to also negotiate when the body is screaming at you, all these many things that happen outside the body, and then try to bring it all together. And ultimately, it's reducing everyone to just you in space, and an audience. There is a moment of quietness, which I really miss. Everything's happening around you and then you go into that space of silence where it’s only your thoughts and you.

As a director, it's about everybody else. It's about working with the team. It's about the musicians. How can we contribute to the art form, to the dancer's career, to the musician's career? It's making sure that mentally they have something to perform, that they are finding chances for them to face an audience, to take them around, to have a great experience, so that when eventually it's time for them to transition or to retire, they can say, Oh, I’ve danced in Luxembourg, I’ve danced in Japan.

So, it’s about working together. It's about everybody else, no longer about you. But I do miss that space. That's why every so often I want to be on stage, because I feel so happy when I do. I have that space and I’m sharing a space with people and their energy impacts your performance. It's commitment towards a performance, towards delivering a message, to connecting with an audience. I love that. And then the process of training your body to music. And as you're doing this movement, you're listening to your body to see what the body is telling you. It's a very profound experience.

So both are equally rewarding. As a director, when we get to the finish line, it’s incredible. Black Sabbath started as an idea, and now it's a huge ballet. I think of all the things that have happened since the first time I shared that crazy idea with the board. They said, well, what do you mean? Not Cinderella, or another classical ballet? No, we're going do Black Sabbath The Ballet! People are saying, is anybody going to come see this ballet? They think I’m crazy.

Then seven months before we open, we still didn’t even know what kind of show it was going to be. We went on sale, and we sold every ticket seven months before opening night. So when you actually sit down and see the show and see the audience standing on their feet, applauding, man, that's incredible. We all did it together, and that's just really, really rewarding.