Carlos Acosta’s love letter to Cuba

It was a time of high hopes and international integration for the country. All the talk was of the scandal of lobster pizzas being created for the rising number of tourists. President Obama had just visited. Chanel was erecting a catwalk along Havana’s main street to stage a fashion show.

Ten years on, Cuba has faded into isolation with increasing social challenges and poverty. But Acosta Danza remains and is performing better than ever, its 15 dancers now drawn from the thriving school Acosta opened at the same time as the company. They look supreme, their style a unique mix of contemporary and classical, street and salsa.

This celebratory programme, first seen in Havana, is a testament to their versatility. It opens with La Ecuación (“the equation”) by the Cuban choreographer George Céspedes, a breezy 15 minutes that features four brightly dressed dancers inside an illuminated cube.

At first, they explore the space individually, each given their own sequence of stretches and bends to test its limits. As Cuban musician X Alfonso’s score kicks into life, they slink in and out of its dimensions together and apart, their pulsing movement angular and clear, full of swift, split-legged jumps and surprising turns. It’s elegant, joyful.

Javier de Frutos’s 98 Días is also a piece of immense sophistication. Its title is taken from the period the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca spent in Cuba in 1930, extending a stay that was meant to last only a week, entranced by the sunshine, the colour, the life. The soundtrack is made of snatches of his poetry – frustratingly read in Spanish without subtitles – mixed with music by Estrella Morente, providing a rhythmic score for a series of strongly patterned, changing scenes.

Around a central figure, De Frutos weaves a tapestry of repeated motifs: extended arms that swoop and curve; little jumps that skim the floor; sideways glances. The dancers pause to listen to the poems, responding to their phrasing; they fling themselves into a series of duets of love and death, rapture and discovery, before returning to a line of chairs at the back of the stage. The tone is constrained, formal, questioning. It’s an examination of Lorca rather than his embodiment.

If there’s something fascinatingly cerebral about De Frutos’s work, Goyo Montero’s Llamada, also inspired by Lorca, is all unhinged emotion. The dancers begin on the floor, writhing in apparent agony, before getting up to form stamping circles and bully a man in a skirt, leering at him with grotesque faces. The theme seems to be of the danger of othering; the mood is angry.

Montero has a strong sense of the dramatic. There’s an awful lot of running and collapsing that shows off the dancers’ extreme flexibility, and duets full of lifts that display their strength. But the piece is somehow oppressive.

De Punta a Cabo, on the other hand, is full of unfettered energy, as the dancers gather on stage in front of an evocative, slightly faded film of dancers lining up on Havana’s Malecón, its famous seawall and esplanade. The choreographer Alexis Fernández, with Yaday Ponce, sets them surging across the stage in ever-changing configurations, their movement a loose and enticing blend of street, contemporary and classical, swirling away until night falls.

The company danced this atmospheric piece in Havana in 2016. With time, it has become a symbol not just of their blending styles and of Cuban vitality, but also of their endurance: the capacity to look to the horizon and keep dancing.

Carlos Acosta’s Nutcracker in Havana is touring the UK from 31 Oct to 11 Feb

Photograph by Argel Ernesto González Alvarez