Head to toe with Julio Bocca.

• Author: Durbin, Paula
• Position: Argentina's star ballet dancer - Interview

As American Ballet Theater's (ABT) golden anniversary extravaganza unfolded last year, critics from around the world pronounced Julio Bocca's interpretation of Solor's variation from La Bayadere the magic moment of the entire gala season. Audiences everywhere gasped as he knelt into an effortless port de bras so deep, his head grazed the floor behind him.

Julio Bocca, Argentina's star dancer, has been on a roll ever since, adding guest appearances in Manila, Tokyo, Leningrad, and Oslo to a schedule already too confusing for his own agent to decipher. Fortunately, ABT has been accommodating. Last year, Bocca's contract was redrafted to allow him to accept extensive engagements abroad. Of the nineteen other ABT dancers who share principal status, only senior ballerina Cynthia Gregory, a veteran of more than twenty-five years with the company, performs under such generous terms.

Bocca owes his bravura, at least in part, to his mother who gave him an advantage few male dancers ever get--an early start. A single parent supporting herself as a dance teacher, Nancy Bocca placed her little boy in first position at her ballet barre when he was only four years old. They lived with her Italian parents who encouraged the project. According to Bocca, his grandparents harboured none of the machista views of the more conservative porteno society.

By the time he was eight, Julio Bocca was ready for full-time training at the Instituto Superior de Arte in the magnificent Colon Theater of Buenos Aires, a grand dame among opera houses occupying an entire city block. The daily commute from his barrio took three hours, but Bocca never complained. Even as a small child he adored the Colon, and he was thrilled to be part of its ballet tradition, the oldest in Latin America.

As a dancer he developed quickly. While barely in his teens he was contracted as a soloist in Caracas. There he caught the eye of Brazilian prima ballerina Ana Botafogo who needed a prince. Taking him by the hand, she taught him to partner as Cuban-born choreographer Enrique Martinez watched from the wings. The following year Martinez cast Bocca as a principal in the ballets he was staging in Rio de Janeiro. Bocca credits Martinez with securing his entry into the Colon corps de ballet. Soon after, the choreographer had completed a residency in Buenos Aires.

The Gold Medal awarded to Bocca at the 1985 Fifth Annual Ballet Competition in Moscow accelerated his rise to stardom, but undoubtedly, he could have made his way without it. For decades the Instituto Superior has prepared male talent for export into the best international companies. Muscular prowess has joined the intellectual stream pouring out of Argentina. In New York, for example, Argentine Hector Zaraspe danced with the Joffrey Ballet and then coached the durable Nureyev-Fonteyn...