Dancer wants to change minds in Mexico

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY

Just 22, Isaac Hernandez already had performed from Havana to Moscow to Jackson, Mississippi, not to mention four years as a professional with the San Francisco Ballet.

The experience left Mexico’s most internationally acclaimed male ballet dancer with one question: “Why is it that I can dance anywhere in the world, except in Mexico?”

Even as he begins his new job as a soloist for the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, the Guadalajara native wants to change ballet in Mexico, recruiting and raising standards for male dancers so that top- level artists will have a proper place to perform.

Hernandez wants to see his countrymen get hooked, just as he did as a boy. “For an 8-year-old kid to say, ‘I want to be a ballet dancer in Mexico,’ was madness at that point,” Hernandez said.

Little has changed in 14 years, even as the rest of Latin America has exploded with ballet talent, producing male virtuosos such as Jose Manuel Carreno and Carlos Acosta of Cuba and Argentines Herman Cornejo and Julio Bocca.

Mexico has had its share of prima ballerinas. But it’s virtually unheard of for Mexico to produce world-class male dancers. The image persists that ballet is for elites in a country of mostly working class and poor — and definitely not for boys.

So Hernandez decided to stage his own professional performances in Mexico, and also traveled throughout the country to give workshops to students at universities and schools of the arts.