Friday, October 17, 2008

Texas Ballet Theater dancer graceful under pressure

By Arnold Wayne Jones of Dallas Voice

Andre Silva

Most gay men of a certain age probably remember the first time they saw Mikhail Baryshnikov — muscular legs clad in tights, leaping through the air with gravity-defying grace and athleticism — and swooning a little. For some, it may be when they first realized they were gay. It’s a reaction Andre Silva well remembers.

“I was extremely obsessed with Baryshnikov,” he readily admits, adding, “I wanted to marry him.” Silva guesses he was 7 at the time.

Only for Silva — who wasn’t even born when Misha was at his prime — his preoccupation wasn’t purely idle. The ballet star was an inspiration for his own aspirations to become a great dancer. And within a decade, his dream would become a reality.

Silva never married Baryshnikov, of course: He’s involved in a long-distance relationship with a man from Prague “because nobody wants me here in Dallas” he jokes. But he is one of the company dancers with the Texas Ballet Theater.

Ballet was, quite literally, in his blood. Before he knew the names Nureyev and Nijinsky, Silva was obsessed with ballet. Born and raised in Brazil, Silva grew up watching his mother, a dance teacher. He automatically fell in love with it.

“She didn’t ask me to dance, but I started to take classes when I was 5,” he says. “It didn’t hit me until I was 12 of 13 that I could become my dream. Next thing I know, I’m in the United States at age 15. I wasn’t fluent in English yet and I was very young. It took me a year or two to adapt.”

He first studied in Miami, then moved on to the Houston Ballet, where he met Sir Ben Stevenson, now artistic director of the TBT.

“He blew me away, so when he moved to Dallas, I auditioned [for the TBT]. It’s been a very good learning experience. I definitely feel like I’m growing as a dancer and a person,” Silva says.

He even won the inaugural Rising Star Award, named after Stevenson.

Now in his sixth season with the TBT, Silva has been a principal dancer in numerous ballets, including previous productions of Mozart’s “Requiem,” a revival of which launches the company’s new season at Bass Hall this weekend.

“It’s an all-male piece, very powerful, spiritual, emotional. It shows the strengths and the weaknesses of humanity,” he says of the dance. And because it is Mozart’s “Requiem” — a dark, imposing piece of music — the challenges are even more taxing.

“It is more difficult not to do romantic music — it’s a question of getting into character and making that character real when you are dancing,” Silva says. “Happy, sad — it flows differently in everything you do. Artistry translates through your emotions, whether classical or contemporary or techno or country. We can’t talk onstage — we act through our movement only. That’s what I love about dancing: You can get inspired by the music and make something real, a story in your head.”

But that concentration has had to share space with the reality of the TBT’s recent setbacks. When the year began, the troupe appeared to be headed toward international acclaim. It had announced a festival tour of China this fall, and was revealed to be one of the resident companies at the Winspear Opera House when the new facility opens next October.

Then this summer, the company’s board revealed that it was deeply in debt, needing an influx of $2 million within a short time frame in order to stay afloat. The news was devastating to Silva and the rest of the dancers.

“When something major like that is happening with your company and you don’t know if you’ll have a job, what do you do?” he asks. “It’s not like you can just leave and join another company — they are all starting their season. We didn’t grow up learning something else; dancing is a career. I was very scared.”

Then the dancers joined forces and organized a fundraising campaign, Get Behind Your Ballet. They hosted tons of events, Silva says: a garage sale, a bar event, silent auctions. The dancers alone raised around $250,000 — proving, he says, “that we really want this company to keep going.”

Although the company still needs a lot of support — Silva is especially anxious to involve Dallas’ gay community, which he says would love the ballet “if they only knew how beautiful it really is” — the effort helped put the TBT on enough of a footing that they could begin their season.

“Maybe this was meant to happen to allow this company to grow. ’The Nutcracker’ will be in December and we have ‘Swan Lake’ in the spring,” Silva says. “The company should still go on.”

And that should keep Silva on his toes for a while longer.

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