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(Journalist)
– She was at death’s door. And she was still dancing. A moving video shared by the Asociacion Musica para Despertar, a Spanish organization that supports music therapy for people with memory loss, claims to show a former prima ballerina with Alzheimer’s disease dancing a routine to Tchaikovsky. Swan Lake of his wheelchair. Marta C. Gonzalez – who died in a retirement home in Valencia shortly after the video was filmed in 2019, according to the BBC – seems energized by the music, broadcast via Musica para Despertar director Pepe Olmedo. She moves her arms gracefully, her eyes shining. But little is known about Gonzalez’s story. Clips of her are interspersed with images of a ballerina many assumed to be a young Gonzalez. Instead, this woman is a former prima ballerina of the Mariinsky Ballet of Russia, dancing a ballet known as The dying swan, do not Swan Lake, by NPR.
The association says Gonzalez was with “the New York Ballet” in the 1960s, but there is no such company. And Gonzalez’s name is missing from the New York City Ballet alumni roster. Dance critic Alastair Macaulay found a 1966 paper from “The Higher School for Professional Studies, Nueva York” and its director, Nikolai Yavorsky, claiming that “Marta C. Gonzalez Saldana”, 19, was a prima ballerina in the “Ballet de las Americas.” But “the only ‘Ballet de Las Americas’ [seems] to be in Mexico (the Folklorico) and in Bogota, ”notes Macaulay. He adds that Yavorsky appears to have been a Russian ballet teacher who died in Cuba in 1947. The document appears to have a Cuban government stamp. Either way, the video shows the power of music, dance, and the human spirit. Olmedo says it was one of the “most awesome times I’ve ever had in my life,” according to HuffPost. (Read more stories about Alzheimer’s disease.)
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