ENA Update
The National Art School in Havana, February, 2005
by Don Skoog
Today,
I walked the cloistered, meandering, earth-red halls of the School of
Dance at the Escuela Nacionál de Arte (ENA). Most foreign students don’t
know it’s there, tucked up into the trees on a hillside behind the
old country club building. It is a disorienting place, both construction
project
and ruin, a proud monument to a visionary dream and a sad witness to its
death.
Built from red ceramic tile, its catalan arched pathways wind around huge
stone domes, turning left or right, each offset in sweeping, asymmetrical
curves that
lead, perhaps, to crumbling spaces where beautiful, feline children dance
the Orishas accompanied by batá drummers, or to the huge, ruined amphitheater
that has never been used. Perhaps soon it will.
It is hard to understand how this forty-year-old
building, so beaten up, could still be so heart-wrenchingly beautiful. The
school was never finished. Construction
was halted well before it was made weatherproof, so its interior spaces have
suffered in the rain and wind of storm season, and the mortar between the
bricks crumbles in the moist heat of the Cuban summer. The last hurricane
blew out windows
and drenched the interior spaces, ruining the few books and dance costumes
stored within.
Yet
the students are still here, still dancing, just as they did
in the days when Castro dreamed of a new education for a new Cuba. But
soon, modern
dance came to be viewed as decadent, and folkloric art as anti-socialist.
The beautiful
new buildings of the ENA, each unique in the world, were seen as expressions
of individualism, not examples of the collective spirit. And so they
were discredited, their architects punished. Their funding was slashed
and their
decline began.
But in today’s tourist-friendly Cuba, dance has once again become respectable,
especially the traditional styles that attract foreigners to the island to watch
and to study. But the school is now hampered by crumbling infrastructure and
deficits, and by an inflexible bureaucracy unable to respond to its needs. (Many
of the high school’s wooden walls were blown out during the last hurricane,
so the administration decided to repaint it.) Each of the eight larger campus
buildings has different needs and the school is trying to address them, but new
construction on old buildings only highlights the decay while creating an esthetic
mismatch of materials––an uneasy, unblended, uncontrolled
collage. And so the story continues. It is not what it once was, and
the climate,
both natural and political, continues to alter it, day by day.
People
write of the awe they feel when surrounded by the ruins of another
time. But it is even more moving to stand in the ruins of living
history, the story
still unfolding––a bright tulip pushing its flower
to the sunlight through dirty snow––the promise of
the new, walking carelessly through the failures of the old, still
too young to heed the lessons
in the decaying
walls that can no longer shield them from the heat or rain.
What
I learned in Cuba is that Art really matters. That what you write or
play or dance or paint is your only testament, the only
permanent witness
to the world
you see with your eyes, or feel in your heart. It is the artist’s
responsibility to give meaning to the past by contributing to the present.
Our failure to
manifest our world is treason, leaving our children, those who ride
on our shoulders,
in a lesser, poorer place.
Practice your art as if the future of the world depended on it. Because it
does. Pick up your pen and write down what you’ve learned. Open your horn case
and show your students the song you were taught. Share your dance moves with
those who didn’t travel with you. Tell anyone who will listen about what
you saw in Cuba. It’s your duty. If you don’t, who will?
Hi Don!
I enjoyed reading your article and seeing your photos. Thank
you for the explanatory narrative, which answered
many of the questions
I had when I walked the out-of-the-way places at ENA. Your
thoughts were very moving. They prompt me, as did
the time with Andres
Alén,
to renew a commitment to play music.
I went to Cuba without expectations
and was flooded with surprises. Andres was able to speak to me in
many layers of language that
I understood. I am beginning to transcribe the lessons which
I recorded and beginning
the training exercises he recommended. I have no idea where
I'm going with any of it, but I feel an urgency to play, practice,
write,
and study
-- possibly teach and use some of the info in the workshops
I give.
Your views about the importance of
music echo something Andres said: "Music is a temporary
and abstract art. It can't be seen like painting or architecture.
The
only way we have music is to make
it happen.
If you don't play it, it doesn't exist."! And a quote he
gave us from Jose Artiste: "Music is the most
beautiful of
the arts."
Anne Muth
