Fernando Bujones, 50, International Ballet Star, Dies
NY Times
Fernando Bujones, whose pure classical technique, sheer power and bold temperament made him one of the first American-born male dancers to become an international ballet superstar, died early Thursday in Miami.
Mr. Bujones with Marianna Tcherkassky in an American Ballet Theater production of “Giselle” in 1995.
He was 50 and had two homes in Florida: in Orlando, where he was artistic director of the Orlando Ballet for the past five years, and in Hallandale, near Miami.
The cause was melanoma, said his cousin Zeida Cecilia-Mendez. The Orlando Ballet announced in September that Mr. Bujones would take a three-month leave to be treated for lung cancer. But Ms. Cecilia-Mendez said the final diagnosis was metastatic melanoma.
Mr. Bujones was one of American Ballet Theater’s most versatile stars from 1972 to 1985 and again in the 1990’s. He dazzled audiences with his whiplash turns as the bravura skater in Frederick Ashton’s “Patineurs,” his precision and perfect Romantic style in August Bournonville’s 19th-century “Sylphide” and his interpretation of more than one troubled hero in Antony Tudor’s dance-dramas.
With his curly hair, slim build and hyperextended legs that inevitably tapered to sleekly pointed feet, Mr. Bujones projected a deceptively wiry silhouette that was immediately transformed by his explosive technique and attention to stylistic detail.
As a young dancer he had two idols: he wished, he said, to combine the purity of Erik Bruhn with the power of Rudolf Nureyev.
In the end, he was himself, a virtuoso of the highest caliber (Solor in “La Bayadère”) who was occasionally idiosyncratic but always meticulous about his work in the 19th-century classics, which he danced in companies both here and abroad. He also staged these works for large and small ballet companies that he directed, including Ballet Mississippi and the Orlando Ballet, as well as troupes in Brazil, Spain and Mexico.
Mr. Bujones joined Ballet Theater in 1972, and two years later he became the first American to win the gold medal at the International Ballet Competition in Varna, Bulgaria, a prestigious event until then dominated by Soviet dancers. But Mr. Bujones felt that his triumph was overshadowed by the defection of Mikhail Baryshnikov at that time.
“Baryshnikov has the publicity and I have the talent,” Mr. Bujones said in youthful exasperation. Reflecting on those remarks in 1980, he said that he had felt his achievements had been overlooked, but that he had since matured “like a good wine.”
Born in Miami on March 9, 1955, Mr. Bujones was sometimes considered a Cuban-trained dancer because he began studying ballet in Havana, to which his Cuban mother, Maria Calleiro, took him twice before she and her son settled again in Miami in 1964.
