When he was just eight years old, Roberto Rodriguez remembers his aunt taking him out of the park where he often played with friends to audition for the ballet school in Havana, Cuba’s capital. He didn’t want to go. Ballet was for girls, not boys. It’s a cliche that has persisted for decades – an enforced idea of what it means to be one thing or another, what choices should be made based on societal concepts of gender.
But his aunt insisted. “At first, I didn’t want to be a ballet dancer, but then it became what I wanted in my life,” he says. Now in his mid-30s, Rodriguez is a soloist at the National Dance Company of Mexico. “When I was a kid I was always sporty, doing gymnastics, taekwondo – sports that were ‘for men’. When I started ballet, in my neighbourhood, there was this idea that I would be a ‘ballerina’, that I would be gay. But that didn’t bother me, I always defended who I was.” After years, these damaging and homophobic attitudes started to change, even for his father, he says. “At first, he didn’t want me to be a ballet dancer; I had to tell him that’s what I wanted for my life. And now he respects that.”
