Fernando Bujones, 50, Principal Dancer at American Ballet Theatre
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Fernando Bujones, who died of cancer yesterday at 50, was one of the greatest ballet dancers ever produced in America.
During the 1970s and 1980s, when names like Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov dominated headlines, Bujones, seven years Mr. Baryshnikov’s junior, declared, “Baryshnikov now has the publicity, but I have the talent.”
It was a boast, but one with a core of truth. Bujones burst upon the dance world at an unprecedentedly young age. After winning the International Ballet Competition in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1974 – the first American ever to do so – he returned to American Ballet Theatre, where he was made a principal dancer at 19 years of age.
But his precocious triumph was muted by the simultaneous defection of the widely heralded Mr. Baryshnikov from the Soviet Union; he also joined ABT. Mr. Baryshnikov took over as artistic director of the company, in 1980, and by 1985 Bujones found it intolerable that new ballets were created for Mr. Baryshnikov but not for himself. In a highly publicized clash, Bujones insisted that ABT have a ballet created for him. Mr. Baryshnikov responded by firing Bujones.
With his newfound freedom, Bujones found himself in demand as a guest artist internationally, and eventually danced with 60 companies in 33 countries. In a career of firsts and youngests, he was the youngest dancer ever to partner with Margot Fonteyn, a prima ballerina at Britain’s Royal Ballet. Others he partnered with included Natalia Makarova, Carla Fracci, Cynthia Gregory, and Gelsey Kirkland.
But Bujones was best-known as a sterling technician of classical ballet technique. When he won the Varna competition, he was awarded a special citation for “highest technical achievement.”
As his performing career came to an end in the mid-1990s – he performed an ABT farewell in 1995, long after the departure of Mr. Baryshnikov – Bujones served as the artistic director of several ballet companies in Mississippi and in Mexico. For the past five years, he was the artistic director of the Orlando Ballet.
It had been a homecoming of sorts for Bujones, a Cuban-American who was born in Miami and considered his 2002 induction to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame the highest honor of his career.
Bujones’s parents were divorced when he was 1 year old, and his mother moved with him to Cuba in 1960, when he was 5. Concerned by her son’s apparent frailty, she enrolled him in the state-sponsored Academia de Ballet Alicia Alonso. Bujones made rapid progress, and when he returned to Miami in 1965, he was soon spotted by a representative of the School of American Ballet in New York, where he became a scholarship student at age 11.
By the time he was 14, Bujones had advanced so far that George Balanchine invited him to join the City Ballet, but Bojones declined. At age 15, he made his professional debut at Carnegie Hall, dancing the pas de deux from “Don Quixote” with fellow student Gelsey Kirkland. As a student, he also danced with City Ballet, but again refused Balanchine’s invitation to join after graduation, opting instead for ABT, because he preferred its more rigorously classical repertoire.
A few months after he joined, in 1972, Ms. Makarova requested him as a partner in “Don Quixote,” but the proposal was declined. Within a year, Bujones was dancing soloist roles and garnering critical raves.
In 1985, Bujones danced at the White House and also made his debut with the Royal Ballet at Covent Gardens. He later became permanent guest artist at the Boston Ballet.
His first two appointments as an artistic director, at the Bay Ballet in Tampa, and the Ballet Mississippi, ended with the companies going bankrupt. He had more success with the Mexican Ballet Monterrey, starting in 1995, where he stayed for several years. Bujones also co-founded the Ballet Clasico Mediterraneo in Madrid.
Asked in 2000 to summarize his legacy to the dance, Bujones spoke of himself in the third person: “He can dramatically alter the artistic standards of a company by the outstanding knowledge and experience his career has enriched him with. Moreover, his humane, caring qualities place him in a class of his own. Every dancer who has worked with him has only the best to say about him.”
Bujones was married twice, first, in 1980, to Marcia Kubitschek, a ballerina and later a member of the Brazilian Congress, and daughter of the late president of Brazil; after they divorced, he married Maria Arnillas in 1991. She served as his assistant in Orlando.
Fernando Bujones
Born March 9, 1955, in Miami; died November 10 of melanoma at a Miami hospital after being treated for lung cancer. Survived by his wife, Maria; daughter, Alejandra; his parents, and a brother and two sisters.