Herman Cornejo and Grupo Cadabra
The Joyce Theater
New York, New York
February 28, 2025
Anima Animal
Artistic Direction and Original Concept: Herman Cornejo
Mindy Aloff
Around 2016, I taught a dance history course to some thirty students from Barnard and Columbia, women and men, almost none of them students of dancing as a practice. I was curious what, if any, dance-history background they were bringing to the class, and so I asked how many students were familiar with some prominent names: Mikhail Baryshnikov (9 or 10), Rudolf Nureyev (2), Anna Pavlova (1), Vaslav Nijinsky (0). Dance is not a field that America at large retains as cultural memory.
Happily, serious dancers are inculcated in their daily classes and rehearsals with the heritage of their art, to the extent that they not only demonstrate acquired memory about the past but also, often, critical preferences. When I taught dance history at another school, a conservatory, a couple of years later, I enthusiastically screened for the group of dedicated pre-professional dancers a Hollywood film of Katherine Dunham and her company at the top of their game. All the students knew who Dunham was, and they explained to me that she was a snooze—old hat, slow, much too simple choreographically. If only she had been able to telepathize, in 1940, popping, locking, and voguing, or the darker repertoire, seventy years later, of the Nederlands Dance Theater!
Herman Cornejo in Anabella Tuliano’s “Anima Animal”
Photo by Steven Pisano
There are no known films of Nijinsky; however, if there were, I wonder whether dancers today would find his performances as magical and thrilling as his contemporaries — dancers and nondancers — reportedly did. My guess is that, yes, the magic would survive but as an unsettling strangeness, like the fantastical sea creatures in the ecosystem recently revealed by an iceberg that broke off from Antarctica — not as the high-fashion glamour with which this artist is typically associated in bio-pics.
Grupo Cadabra in Anabella Tuliano’s “Anima Animal”
Photo by Steven Pisano
In the event, Nijinsky remains a legend among dancers. Indeed, as I was taking my student polls in 2016, Herman Cornejo, the brilliant principal dancer of American Ballet Theatre, has explained that, the same year, he was encountering an anecdote in an Argentinian newspaper about how Nijinsky — on tour in Buenos Aires nearly a century before — had agreed to choreograph Caaporá, a story based on a pre-Columbian legend of the indigenous Guarani people. The ballet then existed as a libretto by the Argentinian poet Ricardo Güiraldes. It concerned Guyra (Cornejo), a warrior who accidentally kills Yvy, the young woman he loves (Ximena Tamara Pinto): Leaping through spirals of grief, Guyra turns into the Guarani’s myth-shrouded Urutau bird. It seems that Nijinsky went so far as to write to Stravinsky about composing a score. Argentinian hopes were excited that the heralded dancer-choreographer would be producing a work that could be called the world’s first purely Argentinian ballet. Unfortunately, Nijinsky’s schizophrenia made it impossible for him to realize his contribution, and Caaporá was considered lost until Cornejo discovered that story in the newspaper and, his imagination inflamed, went ahead to bring the libretto to life as the crossover ballet Anima Animal, given its premiere in Argentina, in 2022.
Herman Cornejo in Anabella Tuliano’s “Anima Animal”
Photo by Steven Pisano
As Cornejo explains in an on-camera interview on Instagram, he did not attempt to construct what Nijinsky, in health in 1917, might have fashioned. Instead, Cornejo emphasizes — separating himself from any personal association with his subject — he made a dance for his own moment, something that, were Nijinsky alive in the twenty-first century, he might have thought about. Cornejo took the extant libretto and, one gathers, did something like storyboard it, plotting the action, including, it sounds like, mapping the dancers’ journeys across the stage. For the actual choreography, by which Cornejo seems to mean specifically the step-making and, possibly, gestures, he called on the choreographer and costume designer Anabella Tuliano, a landsman who also founded Grupo Cadabra, the Argentinian dance company with eight of whose members Cornejo dances Anima Animal.
Grupo Cadabra in Anabella Tuliano’s “Anima Animal”
Photo by Steven Pisano
For a score, he tapped two composers: the sound engineer and electronic soundscaper Luis Maurette (“Uji”), who has spent the better part of two decades researching the ancestral culture of South America; and the composer and conductor Noelia Escalzo, a specialist in the traditional music and folklore of Argentina. Their contributions were sometimes sequential and sometimes layered. Cornejo’s lighting designer, Clifton Taylor, has worked for prominent dance companies internationally (including in many productions performed at the Joyce) and for Cornejo and Alessandra Ferri on their Trio Concert Dance. Since Anima Animal has no set and the costumes are tights and body stockings that convey the image of primeval nudity, the dramatic lighting serves to create time, space, and eternity, as in this opening paragraph of the ballet’s program note: “A colossal explosion in the universe sparks the birth of our planet Earth. Human life, inherently imperfect, unfolds in stages, each one striving to bring the soul closer to its ultimate purification and elevation — a process intricately linked to discovering the essence of the animal spirit within.”
Ximena Tamara Pinto and Herman Cornejo
in Anabella Tuliano’s “Anima Animal”
Photo by Steven Pisano
The 58-minute theatrical result tells the story clearly and engagingly, in a dance language that synthesizes leaps and pirouettes of classical dance with choreographic pictures reminiscent of the architectural and dramatic modern dance styles of Doris Humphrey, José Limón, and Paul Taylor. The indigenous peoples — who also may represent all of humankind — frequently assemble en masse in huddles and circles, elevating Guyra or Yvy as a figurehead for the group. The death of Yvy, an accident when Guyra has a fight with another warrior and Yvy becomes collateral damage, is fully comprehensible thanks to the program note. Some group movement appears meant to suggest elements of the natural world — tides, the wind. I had some trouble recognizing the symbolic references at the time, grasping them when I thought over the dance afterwards; but I think most of the audience must have caught on, as the reception at the end was tumultuous. Tuliano deployed Cornejo very knowingly, so that we saw him in challenging moments of virtuosity and also in meditative interludes with easy transitions between them. He did convey the idea of the arc of a life.
Herman Cornejo and Grupo Cadabra
in Anabella Tuliano’s “Anima Animal”
Photo by Steven Pisano
And the last instant of Anima Animal is a knockout. Guyra is about to make his metamorphosis into the mythical bird, a supernatural transformation that the collaborators achieve together as one. Cornejo takes off into a leap toward the audience, reaching the apex on the last note of the score; and then, while he is still in flight, blackout!
Herman Cornejo and Grupo Cadabra
in Anabella Tuliano’s “Anima Animal”
Photo by Steven Pisano
The Urutau — a real species of bird in Central and South America —-is also known as the potoo or “ghost bird.” It has a tear-drenched, six-note song, each note isolated and descending, as haunting as the cry of a loon. Becoming an Urutau, Guyra commits himself to a life of grieving expression. The great leap, of course, also summons up a memory of Nijinsky, so famous for his incredible elevation in the first years of his career with Diaghilev. An irony of Nijinsky’s last years in dance—when he choreographed his own roles — is that he didn’t showcase his own jumping. Yet the thought guiding Guyra’s transformation has the right spirit and the right animal. I look forward to Cornejo’s next choreographic projects.
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