A journalist in love with ballet
Gabriel Davalos is a visual artist who studied journalism but has dedicated more than a decade to discovering the mysteries of dance photography. Cuba on the move brings more details. teleSUR
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Gabriel Davalos is a visual artist who studied journalism but he decided more than a decade
00:22 to discover the mysteries of dance photography.
00:25 Cuba on the Move has his story.
00:31 Cuban schools of ballet.
00:33 To show their expertise, they don't have to dance in the elegant Grand Theatre Alize
00:38 Alonso.
00:39 They can't delight the most demanding ballet to Mano by dancing in Deep Havana.
00:44 This time they pose for the lens of Gabriel Davalos, a journalist in love with ballet
00:49 and who has been dedicated to dance photography for more than a decade.
00:55 I have had the pleasure of publishing books, of exhibiting in several cities around the
01:00 world, of winning some awards, but what gratifies me the most is having exhibited in most of
01:06 the cities of Cuba, in the squares, in the parks, that pleasure of accompanying people
01:11 where daily life takes place and feeling accompanied, that's me.
01:15 He says that he came to photography by chance.
01:18 He says that he was surprised by dance and ballet at the beginning of his career and
01:23 that for 10 years he was a photographer without a camera.
01:30 I like the metaphor.
01:32 I was a photographer without a camera because I did it in my mind.
01:37 That is, I had neither the camera nor the possibility of having one, but that didn't
01:42 limit me to dream it, to fantasize when I saw a work, to imagine photographs both on
01:47 a stage and since then the idea of living in the stage to use the language of dance
01:54 and photography to tell the story of these times.
02:00 Davalos confesses that sometimes it takes him months to think about a theory or a photo,
02:07 which is why many of the startups he finally gets marked for him an era, a story, a feeling,
02:15 and there is one in particular that reminds him of Cuba and the Cubans.
02:21 It took him a year between conceiving the idea and finding the exact moment to take
02:27 it.
02:28 And it's the one in which a dancer appears in the middle of the storm on the Havana Malecon.
02:39 The Malecon overflowing, the stones on the streets, the waves breaking hard against the
02:43 Malecon, and there is a dancer who is lying down, wet and holding on his feet, a dancer
02:50 who seems to be dreaming, who seems to be flying.
02:55 And I think that somehow that had to do with the whole history of the Cubans because we
03:01 Cubans emerged from the resistance and the difficult times, the complex times, have not
03:06 been an impediment to dream, to think, to believe in more, to have faith.
03:12 These days, Davalos Times is also occupied by another type of creation.
03:18 Just when the pandemic was beginning and we could already glimpse that these were going
03:22 to be strange, difficult, different times, Greta Malecon, the first dancer of the Cuban
03:27 National Ballet, who also accompanies me in life, and I thought that we should find a
03:32 project that would make us grow.
03:35 And that is how we proposed to create a prototype of ballet shoes that would somehow represent
03:40 the Cuban ballet school, and that is where we are, in the final moments of that creation,
03:45 on a factory, on a small factory that aims to cover the demands for the ballet shoes.
03:50 The truth is that Davalos acknowledges that part of his success is due to having lost
03:58 his head over a dancer.
04:03 They say I lost my head for a dancer, but they say wrong.
04:06 I fell in love with all the dancers.
04:09 It is a Cuban roguery.
04:13 Although there is some truth in the fact that I have lost my head for a dancer, and that
04:17 I fall in love all the time with all the dancers because it is the way I have found that romance.
04:25 But that romance from the intellectual, from the thought to connect with that sensitivity
04:31 that dance has to communicate, to accompany, just to say, I think it is a symbolic, metaphorical
04:37 way to show what dance means to me.
04:40 It is of telling the story of the Cubans.
04:43 In these difficult times that Cuba is going through, Davalos says that he is pleased to
04:48 continue taking his art to the most popular places.
04:52 It happens that in his photos, the scenarios are as protagonists as the dancers who, he
04:58 warms, are just the pretext to tell the story of his people.
05:02 He confesses that he is interested in reflecting all Cubans.
05:07 That's why in each image, the spectator can discover sensations, experiences, joys, sadness,
05:15 pain, but a lot of faith.