Mum’s the word: how Yanela Piñera’s mum finally saw her dance
A story of true love, high art and one powerful secret.
She had to be seen from the wings, through Camilo Ramos’s eyes, that white swan princess he fell in love with long ago, spinning on her toes in perfect circles, lit up by the Lyric Theatre stage lights so her ballerina’s frame glowed like the Cuban suns of his childhood. Yanela Piñera was flawless that night of May 13, the night before Mother’s Day, playing the dual lead roles of the princess-turned-swan, Odette, and the black swan minx, Odile, in the final night performance of Queensland Ballet’s Swan Lake.
There was a step sequence in Act Three some choreographers call “the 32 fouettés”. It’s the treacherous ballet equivalent of an Everest climb, where seductive Odile mesmerises the prince by continually whipping one leg around the other, spinning dazzlingly and endlessly on a fixed spot the radius of a two-bob coin. The Odile sequence gave Dame Margot Fonteyn cold sweats. But Camilo watched his partner that night dance so serenely, with such confidence, that he wondered if she knew the secret he had been keeping from her for seven days. Not because someone had told her the secret, he thought, but because she had felt it; that somewhere deep inside her Cuban heart, where she stores all her longing and sadness and fire, she knew her mother could see her dancing.
Camilo cupped his hands nervously, standing in the wings in a leotard, having danced his Act Two pas de deux. The ballet climaxed, true love conquered evil and Yanela conquered Swan Lake. The curtain closed, the audience stood in raucous exultation and Yanela ran into Camilo’s arms. “Yanela,” Camilo said. “I have to tell you something.”
“What is it?” she said, electricity pulsing through her steel and muscle frame.
“There’s a surprise tonight,” Camilo said.
“What is it?” she said, urgently. But the backstage crew were calling Yanela to return to the stage to make her first triumphant bow. “It’s a good surprise, so don’t be scared,” Camilo said.
“What is it?” Yanela said, confused, before she was ushered back on stage where she bowed to her appreciative audience. The curtain closed once more and Yanela scurried back to Camilo in the wings. “Yanela,” he said. “Your mum and your sister …” She was already crying before he had finished the sentence. “They’re watching you in the audience tonight.”
She nearly fell over then, had to clutch Camilo’s right hand to stay upright. She couldn’t speak through her tears. But the curtain was already opening again and the audience was waiting for her second bow. Yanela Piñera returned to the stage and looked deep into the audience. And for the second time that night, a princess was transformed.
The Thomas Dixon Centre on the river side of Brisbane’s West End is a 109-year-old brown brick building that started life as a shoe factory. More shoes are discarded here today than are made: busted ballet flats and pointe shoes, the casualties of any rehearsal led by Queensland Ballet’s renowned perfectionist artistic director, Li Cunxin.
Inside a brick-walled rehearsal space, company ballerinas stretch their legs and lower backs, others tie up ballet slippers tight around their ankles. Outside, at a table on the building’s rear deck, beneath a warm winter sun, Yanela Piñera finds the starting point to her story, the place where all good ballerina stories start. “Ohhh, the shooooooees,” she says.
She was eight years old when she started ballet dancing in her bedroom. Havana, Cuba, 1995. A stick-thin, nimble girl in her bedroom whipping her right leg around her planted left, whipping fouetté after fouetté after fouetté with growing precision, her three-year-old sister, Lulu, sitting below her, wide-eyed and awed by the magic of it all. Yanela saw herself even then as the swan princess, dancing in a sparkling white feather dress on a stage somewhere across the world. Her mother, Maria, worked for a local theatre company. Her father, William, was a doctor, but there are great differences between a doctor in Brisbane, Australia, and a doctor in Havana, Cuba, the greatest being the Cuban doctor’s income. “A poor country,” she says. “Very poor. He does his work for the government, a government worker. Sometimes the costs of ballet are too much for Cuban people. I grew up with small things.”
She shakes her head, trying to convey her thoughts better in English. “Sometimes I wouldn’t have ballet shoes or I’d have one pair to train with for a whole year or one leotard for maybe two years. You don’t have the opportunity to buy that stuff in Cuba. It’s hard to travel. It’s hard to get stuff for your kids. I’d be fixing my shoes up with tape.
“And sometime, my grandma, Doralma, had to make my costumes. And she sewed the shoes.” Doralma sewed her ballet shoes and costumes and stage headpieces for more than a decade as Yanela whip-spinned through pre-teen ballet competitions, through the Cuban National Ballet School, all the way to the hallowed Ballet Nacional de Cuba.
Yanela was on the cusp of entering ballet school when her mother, Maria, asked her if dancing was for life. “Once you start in that national school, it has to be your career forever,” says Camilo, who met and later fell in love with Yanela as a fellow student in the national ballet school. “Professionally, ballet has to be your career. You can’t just throw it in.”
“I did the whole ballet school for free because you don’t pay for education in Cuba,” Yanela says. “But the reason my mother asked me so seriously is because I had to know it was for all time. And you’re a kid and you really don’t understand the commitment, you don’t know how hard it is going to be for your parents. It’s eight years of training. And I finished training at 8pm every day. Sometimes I went home and Mum was making dinner and I was asleep with the tights still on and she’d come and take me to the shower and the next day was the same thing and I was only 12 years old. And you don’t have friends because you have to rehearse on Saturdays while all the other kids are down at the beach and playing games.”
But the nights on stage made it worthwhile. The full-circle pay-off of effort and reward. The width of the smile on Maria Piñera’s face. “You must understand,” Yanela says. “My mum and dad went to every single show I was ever in. Even if I did the smallest part, they were watching. Even if it was the same small role, 20 performances in a row, then 20 times they would watch it. My mum and my dad. Right there in the audience, watching me.”
It was through all those endless shows — all that perpetual spinning — that Maria Piñera watched her eldest daughter grow. She could gauge her mood by the strength of her leaps; she could feel her joy or sorrow or fear or triumph in the lightness of her dance steps. Inside a darkened theatre she would admire her daughter as she transformed into a woman. “Then, for two, three years, I go away,” Yanela says.
In 2014, during a talent scouting visit to Cuba, Li Cunxin was so deeply moved by the work of two lovers on the Cuban ballet stage, Yanela and Camilo, that he invited them to join his Queensland Ballet company as full-time principal artist and soloist respectively. “We had about a month to think about it,” Camilo says.
“I was still living with my parents,” Yanela says. “We are a very close family. We share everything — everything — together. Birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas time. And I say to my parents, ‘Oh, I received this contract. I think we want to go to Australia.’ And my parents are happy because if I’m happy, they’re happy. They knew Australia was so far away but they were happy.”
The memory of that first Havana airport farewell brings tears to Yanela’s eyes. “I think she was crying for a week,” she says of her mother. And Maria kept on crying. At night, she would lie in bed thinking about Australia, 14,500km across the world. She thought about the city her daughter was living in. She knew nothing about Brisbane; she couldn’t visualise her daughter’s place in it. She thought about how glorious it might be one day to watch Yanela perform overseas, what it would feel like to be in an audience seeing all those foreign faces watching Yanela. And she thought about how useless such fantasies were; how she couldn’t afford such a trip. And these thoughts kept her up at night. “And my mother, she feels so strange, you know,” Yanela says. “She’s gone two whole years without watching me dance. She feels, you know, she feels …” She searches for the right word and pronounces it in clear English. “Empty,” she says.
The reviews were spectacular. “Yanela Piñera was a technical tour de force!” gushed Dance Australia magazine. “She showed fragility but also a regal bearing, her pas de deux was breathtaking…” “Soaring with a master” ran The Australian’s headline for Deborah Jones’s review. “Piñera has presence in spades and technical prowess to burn … She laid out her credentials within seconds of taking to the stage with a pure, extended balance en pointe that was an eloquent expression of the Swan Queen’s sorrow and entrapment …”
And yet Yanela wept with sorrow after her opening night performance. “She was exquisite that night,” says Amanda Talbot, who sits on the Queensland Ballet board. “I was just so moved by her performance. But when I spoke to her at the opening night after-party she was just so sad. She started saying how sad she was that her family couldn’t see her dance, particularly in that role. It’s such a special role for a ballerina. She got very teary and then I got teary. Here’s this divine, ethereal creature who had just given this amazing performance — she was dazzling — and then to see her be so crushed that her family couldn’t see her dance.”
“I just got really homesick that night,” says Yanela. “I was crying and I said how special Swan Lake is for my family, such a special ballet for them and for me. I said how wonderful it would be for my parents to see me dance again.”
The plan, impossible as it was, formed that night as Amanda Talbot lay awake in bed. Who’s to say why she went to such lengths in such a short time to see the plan through. Maybe it was because she knows too well what it feels like to be separated from the ones you love. In June 2010, Amanda lost her husband, mining executive Ken Talbot, when the chartered plane he was flying in crashed into thick jungle in the Congo, west Africa. Maybe it was just the mother in her. “If Yanela had been on stage for two seconds, her mum was there to see it,” Amanda says. “I think that’s what really got to me. Her mum not being here to see her in this iconic role that every ballerina dreams of.”
The next morning she phoned Li Cunxin. “Li, we need to get Yanela’s family here to see her dance,” Amanda said. “When is her last performance?”
“Next Saturday,” he said. “One week away.”
“We need to get them here,” Amanda said. She would pick up the travel costs. “Umm, I think that might be impossible,” Li said, typically polite.
Amanda laughs at the recollection. “But I was a bit naughty,” she says. She dropped Mao’s Last Dancer on him. Remember your book? Remember that best-selling epic memoir you wrote? Everybody in Queensland Ballet knew that treasured story about how 11-year-old Li Cunxin was selected by Madame Mao’s people to train with the relentlessly demanding Beijing Dance Academy, before dramatically defecting to America where a choreographer named Ben Stevenson — the very same Ben Stevenson who was choreographing QB’s Swan Lake — handed him a slipper full of dreams the boy from Communist China never dared to dream. Remember that perfect passage in the book when you’re on stage and you realise your parents have been watching you in the audience, you realise they have flown all the way from China to see you? “Remember how that made you feel?” Amanda asked. A pause. “OK,” Li Cunxin said. “Let’s try.”
Li phoned Camilo. “Impossible,” Camilo said. “Yanela’s family don’t have passports.” But Li sold the ambitious plan to Camilo with a single image: the look on Yanela’s face when she sees her mum.
Camilo sprang into action. He spent five days making secretive calls to Cuba, usually while standing in his leotard in a private corner backstage between Swan Lake pre-show meetings and performances. “That whole week Camilo was acting really strange,” Yanela says. “He was on the phone all the time, always walking off somewhere.”
It was agreed Maria would travel with Yanela’s younger sister, Lulu, and Yanela’s father, William, would stay home and provide a smokescreen for his wife and daughter’s inexplicable absence when Yanela called and emailed home. While Lulu frantically applied for express passports, Li engaged his Australian travel agent, long-accustomed to creating impossible travel itineraries in implausible time frames for travelling performers. “And she just worked like a demon for the next five days, working out what countries we could bring them through that didn’t require visas,” Amanda says.
“Then I receive an email from Mum,” Yanela says. “ ‘Yanela, your sister and I are going hiking in the countryside.’ That was really strange to me. Mum never goes hiking. She never does anything like that, nothing. Hiking? Never.”
Yanela phoned home the next day and her father, untrained in the dark arts of acting, gave an Oscar-winning performance as the hapless but loving dad not good on the details but so truly proud of his wife for taking on the challenge of a hike through the hills of Havana. “And I just said, ‘But, whyyyyyyyyy?’,” Yanela laughs. “And he tried to avoid the conversation, change the topic. He made a whole story up, just lying the whole time. At that time they were already flying through Shanghai.” Maria and Lulu flew to Australia via Mexico and China. Amanda and Li picked them up, restless and buzzing, from Brisbane Airport at 10.30am on the morning before the final night performance of Swan Lake.
Camilo was growing genuinely concerned about the physical impact such a surprise would have on Yanela. “Li told me the way he was going to do the surprise — that he was going to announce it on stage after the show — and I thought, ‘Oh no, she’s going to have a heart attack or something. She could be in shock forever.’ I started saying things to her that might prepare her for something like this.” In Yanela’s dressing room after a midweek performance, Camilo looked starry-eyed and reflective. “Remember in Mao’s Last Dancer when Li’s parents appear in the audience from China?” he said, soft and whimsical. “Imagine if something like that happened to you. And imagine if someone did that, invited your parents to see you dance across the world.” Yanela beams, shaking her head: “I was like, ‘Nooo, things like that don’t happen. Things like that only happen in the movies’.”
Before Amanda set off to the airport to pick up Maria and Lulu, a text message landed from Yanela. The 30-year-old master ballerina wanted to thank Amanda for supporting her through her sadness that night after the opening show. She looked forward to seeing Amanda at the final night show. “I’ll be dancing especially for you,” she said.
“I thought, ‘I don’t think so’,” Amanda says. “‘I think you’ll be dancing for your mum’. But you can’t just let a text like that go. I just wrote back, ‘I can’t wait to see you. It’s going to be such a special night’.”
The tears flowed from Maria Piñera from the moment Amanda walked her and Lulu to the Queensland Performing Arts Centre entrance, passing a grand concrete wall on the building’s side emblazoned with a vast banner advertising the Swan Lake season to the citizens of Brisbane; Maria’s daughter, the glittering swan princess, the banner’s glorious point of focus. Her tears flowed when she took her seat inside the Lyric Theatre, five rows from the stage and right beside the woman who got her there, Amanda. And her tears flowed when the swan princess fluttered into the spotlight. The only time Maria tore her eyes away from the ballet’s dazzling lead was to look upon the awed faces of audience members marvelling at the girl she saw in her head, spinning fouetté after fouetté in her bedroom in Cuba, her eight-year-old toes peeking through the front of the worn slippers her grandmother had sewn her.
“She was divine that night,” Amanda says. “It was like she wasn’t real. She looked like a swan. She was the swan.” She wipes a tear from her eye. “Then the curtain came down for the second time and it came back up,” she says. “And Li came back on stage and Yanela came back on stage and Li told the audience Yanela’s family were there. And that’s when Yanela broke down.”
“Oh my God,” Yanela says. “Everything stopped. You can’t see people properly because it’s dark from the stage but I just saw my mum. She was waving.”
Yanela couldn’t hear it amid the applause but Maria and Lulu were primal screaming. Yanela! Yanela! Yanela! Amanda thought for a moment that Maria, right there and then, might climb over the shoulders of the four rows of distinguished guests keeping her separated from her daughter.
Maria and Lulu rushed backstage. Yanela could barely stand. She embraced her mum. “There were no words,” Yanela says. “What? How? Why? Visas? Passports? People don’t really understand how big the moment was, how important that moment was for me and my family. What Amanda did for me that night was the best thing in my life. Ever. No doubt. Best moment in my life. The greatest happiness. It was everything. Love and ballet and family, all in one single moment.”
That single moment spread through the Australian art scene like ripples in a swan’s favourite waterhole. “Everybody got really teary about it,” Amanda says. “I’m still trying to work out why it touched so many people in the way it did.”
The answer is, of course, that the best theatre of all is the theatre of life, as Li Cunxin could attest.
The night after the final performance, Li hosted Yanela’s family in his home for dinner. Another guest of honour was Ben Stevenson, the man who pulled off the same trick with Li’s parents all those years ago. It was Mother’s Day. It was Maria’s day. Amanda cast her eyes around the dinner table at all the people brought together by an idea she had one night when she couldn’t sleep.
Amanda drove Maria and Lulu back to the airport a few days later. Lulu hugged Amanda and gave her an envelope, which Amanda opened when she got home. “Thank you for bringing us here,” the card read. “My mother can sleep at night now.”
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