José Antonio Chávez: National Dance Prize 2023

December 19, 2023

The third gala of the International Camagua Folk Dance Festival granted the moment for the solemn public ceremony to present the 2023 National Dance Prize in this city to dancer, teacher and choreographer José Antonio Chávez Guetton.

"I have given everything I could from immense love. I gave myself totally to dance and truly nothing else mattered to me," declared last night at the Teatro Principal the man who as a very young person was expelled from his father's house in Holguín for wanting to be a dancer.

Santiago Alfonso, National Dance Prize 2006 and jury member, read the ruling from April 2023 when the tribunal convened, presided over by Aurora Bosch, Cuban Jewel of Dance, and also made up of dancers, teachers and directors Johannes García and Isabel Bustos and critic Ismael Albelo.

"Our sincere love for your work, dear friend, colleague and teacher," said Santiago Alfonso upon finishing the text where they place him in the generation that buttressed the choreography of the Camagüey Ballet, and they highlight as beautiful pieces of high artistic caliber Ofelia, Fatum, Vivaldiana and Concierto barroco, in addition to his contribution to the development of other Cuban dance companies.

"Santiago was my teacher and he taught me to love and to sacrifice everything I had to sacrifice for dance," emphasized Chávez, who always remembers the mentorship in Havana in the early sixties when he went to arrange his training to forge a professional career that today spans more than half a century.

"As I gave to dance, dance gave back to me. When it comes to the balance between what you receive and what you give, I believe I received much more because I received the pleasure of giving my work to you, because it is for you that one works," he insisted.

He received the National Prize from the hands of Fernando Rojas, Vice Minister of Culture; Lillitsi Hernández, president of the National Council of Performing Arts, and Francisco González, president of the performing artists branch of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, Uneac.

The award was accompanied by a work by visual artist Martha Jiménez, also originally from Holguín and like him now living in Camagüey. Kenny Ortigas, president of the Provincial Council of the Performing Arts, in his words of praise related his greatest concern with the lack of interest in knowledge, and identified the image of ethics as a primary condition of an artist 78 years of age.

"In this marriage of dance and me, life becomes wonderful. I would like to live many more years for the expressivity, talent, beauty of dance that we do for you. Thank you," concluded the honoree.

It was a rainy night, without the presence of his neighbors from the distant neighborhood where he lives; without most of his colleagues and students, not even from the principal cast of his company because the Camagüey Ballet is on tour in Spain, but at least José Antonio Chávez, on the stage of his beloved theater, dressed like a prince finally received the 2023 National Dance Prize.

In the audience were personalities from Cuban culture and foreign participants of the fourth edition of the Camagua Folk Dance Festival, which will conclude this Sunday and has received more than 300 guests, among them Johannes García, National Dance Prize 2020.