CAGAYANONS and guests were treated to an afternoon of entertainment as the Philippines’ Prima Ballerina, Lisa Macuja, showed off her graceful dances in a rare performance at SM City Atrium on Sunday, September 6.

The 45-minute show brought together Ms. Macuja’s best of the best performances celebrating her 25 years as an international ballerina, which is part of her mall tours that kicked off on August 30 in Manila and has traveled to Davao and Cebu, in cooperation with SM Malls.

For updates from around the country, follow Sun.Star on Twitter

With the way Ms. Macuja danced the Russian Classic plays Swan Lake and Don Quixote, she is indeed, the country’s one and only Prima Ballerina.

Don Quixote is a ballet originally staged in four acts and eight scenes, based on an episode taken from the famous novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.

At the Cagayan de Oro show, Ms. Macuja got equal support from her four former male students at Ballet Manila School, a training center for ballet professionals that focuses on the Russian Vaganova method where she has over a hundred students and scholars.

The four dashing male dancers who all gave an equally remarkable performance are Niño Guevarra, Gerardo Francisco, Rudy de Dios and Nazer Salgado.

Not retiring

Ms. Macuja, the first Philippine ballerina and first foreign soloist who ever joined the Kirov Ballet in 1984, started ballet when she was eight years old.

During a chat with the media after her show, Ms. Macuja says she was inspired by three women to go into ballet – her mother and two ballerinas, a Filipina and a Japanese.

She says her mother was a ballet dancer until her early teens when the Catholic Church banned girls from dancing ballet in the Philippines in the 1950s.

“It was considered a sin to dance ballet during that time. The Papal Nuncio banned all Catholic girls from dancing ballet. It was my mother who really encouraged me and supported me all the way. I inherited my flexibility from her,” Ms. Macuja says.

Before her love for ballet went full blast, her father wanted to send her to Russia to go to college and become an accountant.

But things went differently.

“That never happened,” she says.

The trip to Russia never gave her a diploma in accounting but a scholarship at the Academy of Russian Ballet (formerly called Vaganova Choreographic Institute) at the time when the country was still under the communist.

At 17, she pursued her dreams of becoming a ballerina at the Academy. Since then, she says she never stopped dancing.

Twenty-five years later, she had danced more then 60 performances of the Swan Lake and more than 300 times for Don Quixote in different countries, different cities and different companies. She had performed the principal roles in over 200 full-length and contemporary ballets in some 81 cities, spanning five continents

And she says she would continue dancing.

Ballet in the Philippines

Ms. Macuja says there are a lot of good ballet schools in Manila, Bacolod, Cebu, Cagayan de Oro, Davao and other areas in the country,

However, she says the training she got from the school in Russia was very different from the training that ballet schools in the Philippines offer.

“In Russia, ballet lessons are held every day but here in the Philippines, sometimes it happens only in a week or during weekends. It’s hard to catch up with our counterparts abroad. But for my scholars at the Ballet Manila School, I asked them to come every day because it is necessary,” she says.

Ms. Macuja says ballet in Russia is more than 250 years old but in the Philippines, it is only about 75 to 80 years old with only five or six generations of dancers.

“Ballet is a hand-me-down art form. Success in it is not something that you are born with. It has to be earned from very good teachers,” she says.

She adds that ballet cannot be learned in one or three months but over a period of six to 10 years.

“You have to start while you are about five or six years old so you can really be good at it in your teens in order to have a career in it. The learning to go on pointes and balancing on pointes takes a lot of years,” Ms. Macuja says, who have danced with famous ballet dancers in Russia, America, China, Australia, among other countries in the world.

One important thing, she says, for a ballet dancer is to develop an audience who would appreciate ballet dancing as a performance art.

“You need to constantly update and innovate or else, you would lose generations of audience. You need to constantly generate interest on ballet,” she adds.

She says classically-trained ballet dancers can do folkdance, modern, jazz or contemporary dance but it would be very hard for a hip-hop dancer to dance ballet.

Greatest achievement

In her 25 years as an international ballerina, Ms. Macuja has earned dozens of awards and distinctions, one of which is the Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World.

However, she says her greatest achievement is having an international career while being based in the Philippines.

“Dancing in front of the audience in Singapore, Tokyo, Russia, Japan or other countries and having them say that this dancer is from the Philippines is for me, a great achievement,” she says.

Indeed, the Philippines is very proud to have Ms. Macuja who, for 25 years, has never stopped bringing honor to the country.

Her silver years in the business will be shown in a three-day concert on October 2, 3 and 4 at the Aliw Theater, aptly titled “Lisa at 25,” which she says is once-in-a-lifetime show highlighting never-before seen photographs and videos of her past performances around the world.

Published in the Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro newspaper on September 8, 2009.