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Fernando Bujones
1955-2005

By John Percival
copyright ©2006 by John Percival
  

Off-stage, in my admittedly limited experience, Fernando Bujones was pleasantly composed and polite; not at all pushy and big-mouthed as sometimes imagined.   Ambitious he certainly was, but perfection was his aim, not just fame.   His idols and role models were the two most perfect he could find: Erik Bruhn for the purity of his style, and Rudolf Nureyev initially for his power, later realising also, and emulating, the Russian’s wide range.  Because Bujones’s physical skills were so extraordinary, people tended to attribute his eminence just to that, but there was much more to him.  He said himself that “to dance a role is to become the character of the role you dance”, and his illustrious international career was to be based on a wide variety of interpretations—not forgetting that whenever I saw him he gave a distinctive character even to a plotless dance.

In Britain, we first saw him pretty young but heard of him even sooner, thanks to reports of his astonishing precocity while still a student. Can we doubt that he was most brilliant male virtuoso produced by ballet in America? And his technique, his musicality and pure classical line were all there, it seems, from the beginning.  He was born American, on March 9, 1955, in Miami, Florida, because his Cuban mother was visiting relatives there, but she soon took him home with her to Havana, and that was where he began learning dance— initially (what luck!) on medical advice that exercise would improve his poor appetite.  Standards there, we know, were high, and one of the schools he attended was Alicia Alonso’s.

But after the revolution he and his mother (by now divorced) fled Cuba; there were no direct flights to the USA and they found themselves on an extraordinary journey via Canada, Prague and Paris.  

Living again in Miami, he studied with his cousin, Zeida Cecilia-Mendez, who must have been a rather good teacher because he took her as his lifelong coach.  But when Jacques d’Amboise came to Miami on a private enterprise tour, mother had young Fernando waiting ready in the wings and begged the NYCB star to audition him.  The result was a scholarship at the School of American Ballet, where he came under the distinguished tuition of two great teachers, who both began showing his talent in performance.  Stanley Williams cast Bujones in school productions of Bournonville ballets, starting with a Napoli solo at 14; the following year André Eglevsky caused a sensation by setting him to partner 17-year-old Gelsey Kirkland in the Don Quixote pas de deux with his company on Long Island.

George Balanchine more than once invited this gifted boy to join New York City Ballet, but he had taken against Balanchine (so he told me long afterwards) because of an occasion when the latter, inappropriately Bujones thought, had castigated all the male students at the school over some silly offence.   And maybe American Ballet Theatre’s more broad-based repertory, especially the chance to perform the classics, would anyway have attracted him to go there on graduating in 1972.

Leading roles came at once, including Variations for Four and Etudes, both of them demanding showpiece works, and he was promoted to soloist ranking after only a year. His London debut followed almost at once, dancing with ABT ballerina Eleanor d’Antuono in the Diana and Acteon and Don Quixote showpieces at a gala in aid of homeless families organised by the British dancer Anya Linden.   

At only 19 years old, in 1974, Fernando Bujones took time off from ABT to enter the world’s most highly regarded competition for dancers, at Varna, Bulgaria.  Habitually, the winners came mostly from Russia, which gave them every support.  Bujones, acting on his own initiative, and competing against the odds in the senior division, came away with not only a gold medal but a special award for highest technical achievement. “Perfect” Anton Dolin wrote, as one of the judges; “such presence, such true magic”.  Bujones was now promoted by ABT to be a principal dancer, but felt robbed of the acclaim he had earned because the press found the older, more established Mikhail Baryshnikov, newly defected from Russia, more newsworthy. That rankled.  Bujones’s comment, as he later recognised, was not the most tactful: “Baryshnikov has the publicity; I have the talent”.  But this only gave a personal edge to what would anyway have been a professional rivalry for roles and prominence.

With ABT, Bujones enjoyed a diverse repertoire: all the classics of course (he said that La Bayadère was his favourite) but also Americana such as Fancy Free or Billy the Kid, modern dramas including Miss Julie and Roland Petit’s Carmen, and such display ballets as Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux or Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs and Les Rendezvous.  He found Antony Tudor’s ballets particularly fascinating to interpret (Shadowplayintricate and sophisticated, he said and Undertow were revived for him); likewise Glen Tetley’s Gemini. But Twyla Tharp’s Bach Partita was about the only new work made for him there.  An ABT season at the London Coliseum enabled him to show the dazzling, almost incredible complexity of his footwork in Grand Pas Classique, and also brought him satisfaction when the review of Giselle in The Times found his interpretation deeper and more moving than Baryshnikov’s.

It was with ABT that Bujones first tried his hand at choreography: what he defined as “a light classical work”, Grand Pas Romantique to old music by Adolphe Adam, premiered in 1985.  Soon afterwards, however, he left ABT after a dispute when he refused to substitute for Baryshnikov in a New York season because they would not bring in a new ballet for him.

He had no lack of other openings.  They included  two guest
engagements with the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, initially dancing the Kingdom of Shades scene from La Bayadère— their production was by Nureyev, but he brought his own breath-taking solos, so astonishing that I bought tickets to go back to it again and again (yes, a critic paying good money to watch dancing!).  On returning, he did the Corsair pas de deux, the “Friday’s Child” sequence (created for Nureyev) in Ashton’s Jazz Calendar and, joyously, the Ashton Fille mal gardée which he loved for its youthful buoyancy.  He had already danced La Sylphide with Scottish Ballet; that had been, he wrote, “from the very beginning one of my favourite roles” where he found it possible to “identify myself with the romantic characterisation”.  Later he played London seasons with Maurice Béjart’s company and one from South America, but these were only a few of the diverse engagements over the years which took him, reputedly, to 60 companies in more than 30 countries.   They included the Paris Opera (you should have seen him in Nureyev’s superb Don Quixote there!), the Moscow Bolshoi, La Scala Milan, and the Boston and Joffrey companies, plus leading troupes in Berlin, Munich, Rome, Stuttgart, Tokyo and Vienna. The Brazilian choreographer Dalal Achar created two ballets for him in Rio de Janeiro: Com Amor and Nosso Tempo to music by, respectively, Adam and Astor Piazolla, and Béjart made Trois Etudes pour Alexandre on him

When Baryshnikov ceased to direct ABT in 1989, the new management asked Bujones back as principal guest artist and he gave his farewell performance with them at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in 1995. Subsequently he coached, directed or choreographed for various troupes and since 2000 had been director of the Orlando Ballet, Florida, credited with greatly raising the level of dancing and repertory in what had been an average local company.  When he was reported as ill with lung cancer, the dancers issued a statement that “he has taught us to strive for perfection and has infused into us his iron will and strength of mind”.  He was said to be responding to treatment, and his sudden death, only a few weeks later, of metastatic melanoma was unexpected.

His first marriage, to Marcia Kubitschek, daughter of the former Brazilian president, was dissolved, but their daughter Alejandra, together with his second wife, the Peruvian-born former dancer Maria Arnillas, were with him when he died in hospital in Miami, on November 10, 2005.  He was only 50, so we must do without who knows how many years in which he might have handed on his invaluable knowledge and skills to new generationsand above all, have inspired them with his attitude.  But sorrow at his loss must be tempered with joy at the memory of how much he brought to dance in his short life.

He published a book about his experiences and his roles, and simply to look at the many photographs in it, as I did in preparing these comments, is to be amazed and delighted over again at the exuberant joy with which he used his immense power (surprising in such a slim, wiry figure), smiling in even the highest or most involved jumps.   What a dancer, and what a man.

Volume 4, No. 1
January 9, 2006

copyright ©2006 John Percival
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last updated on January 9, 2006