Carlos Acosta
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2005
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway is the dancer Carlos Acosta. Carlos Acosta is one of the greatest ballet dancers of his generation. He is the first black principal dancer at Covent Garden. Tocororo, the show about his own life, that he wrote, choreographed and starred in, broke box office records at Sadlers Wells and in his homeland of Cuba he is a national hero.
But his extraordinary success has followed an even more remarkable journey from the impoverished back streets of Havana. He was the youngest of 11 children and, as a boy, his only ambition was to be a footballer. At the age of nine, his father sent him to ballet school - inspired not by art, but by the promise of free school meals and the hope that his increasingly delinquent son would be brought into line by the strict regime. Carlos hated it, was bullied by his friends and was twice expelled.
The first time, his father persuaded the school to take him back, the second, his father found another ballet school and secured Carlos a place there as a boarder. It was only there, at the age of 13, that he had an epiphany. Seeing the Cuban National Ballet perform he decided he did want to follow that path. At the age of 16 he travelled for the first time to Europe, he won four major dance competitions in one year and his career as an international ballet dancer was launched.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Bacalao Con Pan by Irakere Book: Dirty Trilogy of Havana by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez Luxury: Case of Havana rum
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a dancer at Covent Garden or across the Atlantic in the American |
| 0:34.1 | theatre ballet he's a star but in the country he comes from Cuba he's a national |
| 0:39.0 | hero because his is a story of hardship turned to fortune. After a rough and difficult |
| 0:45.2 | childhood in the back streets of Havana he ended up in a boarding school where he |
| 0:49.0 | learned to dance ballet. He was sent to Europe on a scholarship and began to win international competitions. |
| 0:55.2 | His career took off and although he felt often very isolated and homesick, he became one of the |
| 1:00.9 | most admired principal dancers in ballet today. |
| 1:04.5 | Last year he created his own show based on his life that premiered in Havana and was nominated |
| 1:09.2 | for an Olivier Award when it showed in London last summer. |
| 1:16.3 | Cuba, he says, is my inspiration. I can't live without going back there. It is who I am, which is Carlos Acosta. And that show you created Carlos called tocaroro is a reflection of all the |
| 1:25.6 | styles of dance really that have informed you from salsa to classical ballet |
| 1:30.2 | and everything in between that's right and of course you know the Cuban element |
| 1:34.0 | has to be there as well as the classic element and everything and I just wanted to |
| 1:39.0 | tell some story created from my own imagination. I mean I've been doing interpreting the roles of |
| 1:45.5 | Prince and all these roles and it takes a great deal of imagination to bring them to life. But I was trying to create something on my own. |
| 1:57.0 | And so I come up with this story. |
| 1:59.8 | But if anybody had told you when you were a little boy of 8, 9, 10 on the streets of Havana that |
| 2:06.2 | you were one day going to dance the Prince in Swan Lake at Coffing Garden. |
| 2:10.7 | How would you have reacted? |
| 2:11.7 | I mean, I would laugh about that, course me I be the ballet dancer that was just |
... |
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