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Alastair Macaulay on ‘The Nutcracker’ - Conversations on Dance podcast

In conversation with Alastair Macaulay on the origins of ‘The Nutcracker,’ elements of the production that have been lost over time, different versions Alastair has reviewed, and finally, which production he finds to be the best.

Let’s Talk Music - Phillip Gainsley's Podcast

An enlightening conversation with Alastair Macaulay, on the subjects of theater, dance and opera

Conversations on Dance Podcast

Alastair Macaulay has been a guest on the Conversations on Dance podcast numerous times discussing dance history, news within the dance world, and much more.

Marta Cinta González Saldaña - Radio Interview

As many of you now know, a 2019 video of an old lady with dementia and/or Alzheimer’s has gone viral in the last week, being watched by more than a million people on YouTube and being circulated by Antonio Banderas, Jennifer Garner, et al. The video shows this old lady, one Marta Cinta González Saldaña, responding to two sections of “Swan Lake” in her Spanish care home, thanks to a music therapist: she responds throughout her upper body in a vividly “swan” ballet way.

This has led to an inquiry about who she was; she died earlier this year, leaving documents about her life that contradict one another - she spent parts of her life in Cuba, New York, and Spain. I added my voice last week on social media, pointing out various problems - she hears “Swan Lake”, and responds in simply a generalised “swan” way even when the music changes to the non-swan Act One celebratory all-human waltz, while the video is spliced with clips of a ballerina in a swan tutu whom many non-connoisseurs have thought is Marta Cinta but actually is the much younger Russian Maryinsky ballerina Uliana Lopatkina. Several people wrote in to give me further details on Marta Cinta, though whole decades of her life remained unclear.

I was interviewed on Friday 13 November by a Canadian radio programme about this. Over the weekend, a Spanish paper, “El Español”, published a good piece of investigative journalism to which (in translation), alas, I don’t know how to link here. The gist is that Marta Cinta was a dancer-choreographer in her youth; she later claimed to have been a New York ballerina, for which there is no evidence as yet; she later taught in Madrid; and was in an advanced state of confusion when she wound up for her final years in a care home for the elderly near Valencia. Nobody knew her age or much else about her, though “El Español” had excellent incidental details.

For those of you who want to listen to me for three minutes describing this story, here’s the link to the CBC Listen programme: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/15808955-mystery-behind-viral-video-woman-dementia-dancing-swan It aired this morning/afternoon depending where you live. At the end, they added a good note about the findings in “El Español”.