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 this week 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 aims to lead his countrymen to the practice barre in hopes they will grab on and get hooked, just as he did as a boy pirouetting beneath the clotheslines on his parents' uneven concrete patio.
"For an 8-year-old kid to say, 'I want to be a ballet dancer in Mexico,' was madness at that point," Hernandez said in an interview with The Associated Press.
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, who now directs the national ballet in Uruguay.
Mexico, known for its frenetic, heel-stomping folklorico dance, has had its share of prima ballerinas, including Elisa Carrillo, a principal dancer for the Berlin Ballet. 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.
"That has given me a sense of the reality and the needs that they have," he said. "And one of the greatest needs that they have is to have somebody to look up to."
Hernandez, a slender and chiseled 5-foot-10 with wide-set eyes and a mop of black ringlets, grew up as the sixth of 10 children in a ballet family. His father, Hector, danced in Mexico and then for several U.S. companies, including the Harlem Dance Theater and the Houston ballet, where he performed with Hernandez's mother, Laura Elena. The couple run a dance studio in Guadalajara.
Hernandez left home at 12 to study at the Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia, where he started to rack up awards and recognition, including a gold medal at the USA International Ballet Competition, one of the major international competitions, at age 16.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/23/3776595/world-class-mexican-dancer-seeks.html#storylink=cpy
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