—Liliana Belfiore
One stormy autumn night in Buenos Aires, a benevolent uber driver handed me a piece of paper with a handwritten home telephone number for Liliana Belfiore—one of the most important prima ballerinas of all time.
In Argentina, the final stop of my Bailando Journey chronicled in my memoir Finding Rhythm, I got the chance to sit down with this classical dance icons and ask her questions about her own dance journey and impressive dance repertoire in this moving and inspiring interview.
In this full transcript of the interview, you’ll discover Liliana Belfiore’s extraordinary evolution through dance, the icons the encountered along her path, and what dance means to her, and to humanity.
Interview by Aliénor Salmon on 8 May 2017 – Buenos Aires, Argentina
Translated from Spanish
Liliana Belfiore: All human beings have innate gifts. Dance for me is a link with God. It’s something that one does out of a necessity that comes from within and that’s very profound. It’s about turning your emotions over towards the outside, to share your feelings with another—whether it’s a dance on stage or off the stage. I say it’s something innate because, when I started to walk, I would walk in half-points. I had a walker that wouldn’t allow me to put all the weight of my foot onto the floor. When I was old enough to walk along without the walker, I continued walking in half points, and people thought that I was going to fall from the way that I walked. But I never lost my balance.
Back in the day cinemas would have what is called a numero vivo during the intermission—a live performance of singing and dancing. I remember being very young, and every time I would get up into the passageway to dance. And this was until the early 1950s— it was an initiative to give artists work. Under the Peron government there was a national movement to make sure everyone had work, and art was considered a necessity, so artists ranging from guitar-players to ballerinas of all kinds from classical to folklore or tango found work inside the cinemas.
One day, my parents met a woman calling Dione, who would later become the head of the Teatro Colon—Argentina’s national ballet. At the time, she wasn’t the director, but was working at the local hairdresser’s. She came to our house, and saw me dancing in the patio. I was six and a half.
“This little girl has an enormous talent,” she told my parents. “You should take her to the school of the Teatro Colon.” And that’s just what they did. I enrolled at 7 years old and finished at 18. By 15 years old I was already a professional dancer and entered through audition at the Teatro Argentino de la Plata and became a soloist and prima ballerina. By 19 I entered the Teatro Colon, again based on auditions. Within 15 days of being admitted to the Teatro Colon, something very important happened: George Balanchine—the world-famous American choreographer [and co-founder of the New York City Ballet]—came to work with us. He was the husband of Maria Tallchief, whose sister was Marjorie Tallchief—two very important and famous American ballerinas. He came to set up different ballets, and for one of them he gave me the role of prima ballerina, in the same ranks of some of the most important ballerinas like Norma Fontela and Jose Neglia.
Then at 25 years old, after touring all of Latin America—Mexico, Brazil, and basically every country minus Bolivia and Guyana—I danced Giselle, Swan Lake and the Nutcracker with the Teatro Colon. There was one very important tour we did in 1973, where I danced with Soviet ballerina Maya Pilsetskaya in 1974 in a production of Swan Like. She was Odette [the white swan] and I was Odile [the black swan] in the same function choreographed by Jack Carter—it was the most marvelous version! To dance with her in the Teatro Colon was something unbelievable—imagine, one of the most important figures in Russian ballet in the twentieth century.
Then I went to England at the age of 26 or 27, and for two years in a row, I was selected among the top three prima ballerinas in the world along with Natalia Makarova and Lynn Seymour. I stayed in England for five years, and there I danced with Rudolph Nureyev in London, Paris, New York and Washington DC, for the London Festival Ballet now known as the English National Ballet.
I came back here in Argentina, and from that moment I was directing different ballet companies, even at the Teatro Colon at one point where I directed Sleeping Beauty. By the age of 23, I’d already choreographed my first ballet at the Teatro Argentino de la Plata—a beautiful theatre and second most important in the country. Ever since I’ve continued to choreograph, to teach classes, and to dance… And I continue doing it now—because I believe that dance is one of the most beautiful things that a human being can do.
Liliana Belfiore: It’s work. It’s passion. It’s obsession. It’s also a desire. You need to believe that when you do it, you imagine yourself doing it in the best way possible—and you need to really work a lot. It’s a search for beauty, perfection. But…what is perfection? Perfection is beauty within the movement, within the expression.
It’s being a painter of the music. The dancer is the palette of the music—because the music is invisible. You have dancers who are really skilled, almost acrobats, but they’re not great artists, because they don’t have the ability to hear, a sensitivity that impels them to be transmitters of musical phrases, of ideas. Classical dance is a compendium of different things because you need to represent something that is historical to reflect a different point in time, magical to enter a world of myths and legends, while staying bound to reality, so what you are dancing is authentic and real, and the audience doesn’t just watch you but transform themselves from a spectator to something that is under your skin. A dancer needs to interpret the emotions that will become your emotions—a mirror of their audience.
For many years, dance wouldn’t allow you to lift yourself off the floor of the stage for so long. Classical dance dancers to defy gravity and leap to reach the magnitude of beauty, the magnitude of truth, and in certain ways, the magnitude of the divine. That’s why in so many ancient cultures, and rituals, dance was so important.
Liliana Belfiore: In 1975 I danced the dying swan. When I danced it, it provoked a great emotion in people. In the audience there was a man called Anton Dolin, a British artist who became a Lord in recognition of his contribution to art. He came up on stage to congratulate me and tell me that he had seen every great ballerina dance the scene of the dying swan, and that apart from Ana Pavlova, none had moved him in this scene except for me. This, was for me, the greatest praise I could possibly hear—especially from a scholarly man like him.
When I danced this scene in Cuba, a scene that lasts 3 minutes, they applauded for 30. They just kept clapping, and there wasn’t a way to even stop the audience. That was in 1978, during a big international festival. They had to stop the function because the clapping lasted for so long.
Dancing with Nureyev was also an extraordinary experience, he was a very passionate man who loved dance with a unique profoundness. His technique and his work is what helped him get out of poverty—and of a life that was really very hard. Thanks to dance, his love for dance, and his dedication to his work, he was able to communicate to so many people. At one point he was the partner of Margot Fonteyn, and the second greatest male ballerina after Vaslav Nijinsky.
Another beautiful experience was the first time that I directed a ballet—I had a group of six ballerinas from the Teatro Colon—and we were contracted to perform in Aguaray in the north of Salta. While we were in the theatre that didn’t have a backstage, but instead a small set of stairs on each side of the stage with a door that faced the street. The door had small holes in it. We put paper there so that it would look a bit tidier. During the performance, the holes started to reappear, and it was children from the streets that had come to watch us dance from outside. To be able to “open the door” to people who had never seen ballet before—that was something wonderful. That’s why I was the first to pioneer free ballet functions across the country for the general public with sponsorship from a company. I’ve worked in dance and culture my entire life—and this is what I like to do. It’s one thing for circumstances can change, for times to change, but passion—that never ends.
Liliana Belfiore: It depends with whom I’m dancing. For example, I also dance tango, and that is a dance characterized by a relationship. One assumes that it’s the man who leads, but for me that’s not the case. It’s a dialogue, like us right now chatting—If you want to interrupt me then I need to let you. That’s what it’s like in Tango, one needs to be permeable to what the other wants, what they desire. When you dance a choreography, it’s not the same because you have a specific choreography to follow with strict limits. But in any case, depending on what you dance, you feel different emotions. If you dance Romeo and Juliet for example, it’s a completely different emotion than dancing Giselle or Swan Lake. The argument conditions the emotion that one can feel—how much and what type of emotion. A dancer needs to be completely expressive, but they don’t need to be fictitious or exaggerated. You need to have the perfect balance between what is internal—what I’m feeling and trying to embody the character—and the technique. The mind controls the technique and the heart handles the emotional. It needs to be a perfect balance so that, rather than losing the technical part, it is amplified by the expressive part.
Liliana Belfiore: One must prioritize the expressive, the emotive and the sensitive—but for that you need a great level of technical mastery. So while you’re performing you don’t even need to think about the technique, it’s already part of you as something natural. Technique has to be natural in order to give the dancer the liberty to enjoy and give themselves emotionally.
Liliana Belfiore: Alegría—dance procures joy. The director of the school at the Teatro Colon, when I was accepted, gave me the greatest compliment. He said: “Liliana Belfiore is the joy of dance”. Because I was so happy, and the technical aspects just came naturally, allowing me to do what I really loved, and to do it exceptionally well.
Liliana Belfiore: It’s the offering of oneself to music and to movement, it’s the surrender of your feelings, thoughts, and body through music, movement, and expression. A dance is gifting oneself to another. When one dances, they desire to give themselves to the other—that’s why dance is inherently social. It’s born as a social modality, a form of communication between people, and one that is primitive—the first artistic forms of communication of humanity are dance and song!
One needs to feel happiness when they dance. When you finish dancing you should feel, happy, accomplished—not in a class, but in a performance or an event. If you dance Tango with someone that you don’t like, or with whom you don’t feel that there’s communication—it feels uncomfortable and there can be no happiness. That’s why Tango is so difficult because it’s something close and intimate.
Liliana Belfiore: If everyone danced and communicated with one another through dance or through song, there would be no wars. Because to dance with another person, you need to show love, respect, recognition—as an individual. That’s why there are so many types of dance in the world that represent different cultures.
Liliana Belfiore: Yes at one point in Argentina there was a search for our ‘roots’ in classical culture, and there was a promotion of opera and ballet that had folkloric roots. The national folkloric ballet was born out of the need to put a stamp on a dance that is our very essence. I also believe that Tango and folkore, offer very different ways of seeing life. It’s not the same to dance a northern Chacarera than a Chacarera as they dance it in Santiago, and it’s not the same to dance a zapateo from the north and a zapateo from the south. It’s not the same dancing a ballroom tango as you would in Villa Crespo, to dancing Tango chico that people danced in the centre.
They are styles that were born of different conditions. For example classical dance has a pyramid structure where one person is in charge, and they’re the boss. Then the choreographer, the director, the teacher, the prima ballerina etc. It’s all a pyramid structure—and everyone wants to be at the top. It’s highly competitive. But at the same time it selects you, purifies you. It was in the time of Louis XIV that classical dance started and that it became established—so we owe classical dance to the Sun King. He was a dancer too, and the first time he danced in a ballet called Mademoiselle de la Nuit. That’s how it was established and how it spread. And now we all dance in different ways–in Argentina we have our own way of dancing. Once I took a class in Europe and the teacher asked me “Are you Argentinian?”. I said “Yes” and she says: “Who was your teacher?”. When I told her she was so shocked she fell to her knees and said “I owe that woman everything I know”. She was a woman who had become a teacher very young because her level was so high. Argentina has incredible dancers, but somehow it isn’t recognized enough. It’s a real shame.
Liliana Belfiore: Like you, I believe that dance is a form of contemplating and valuing others. To have a form of contact with the other—to look at them, to be in their embrace, to offer a smile—whether you open up your arms, offering yourself in a Chacarera, or gazing at your partner with a smile as you do a port de bras. The essence of the dancer lies in that gaze.
Behind every dance, there is a story. This book will take you dancing from New York to Buenos Aires, immersing you in the local culture, history, and happiness with every dance step. Aliénor Salmon is represented by Gregory Messina of the Linwood Messina Literary Agency.
© 2022 – Bailando Journey Ltd. All rights reserved.
