“I Don't Stop, Linger On My Laurels, And Say, ‘Look At Me, How Gorgeous I Was’”: Carlos Acosta On The Art Of Motion

The Havana-born dancer became the first Black principal of London's Royal Ballet in 1998. Now, at 53, he’s as propulsive as ever – running not one but two dance companies, and returning to the stage this summer.

When Carlos Acosta says “I have to keep moving”, he means it figuratively. If he didn’t have to keep moving, he probably wouldn’t be running his own dance company, Acosta Danza, which he founded in 2015 to nurture new Cuban talent, while concurrently serving as director of Birmingham Royal Ballet.

But, as even casual Acosta fans will know, he also has to keep moving in a very literal sense. Though it’s been 11 years since he called time on his groundbreaking career in classical ballet – famously, he was the first Black principal dancer of London’s Royal Ballet – Acosta has never really stopped dancing. “I don't stop and linger on my laurels, and say, ‘Look at me, how gorgeous I was,’” Acosta says, sounding grounded but impervious to false modesty. “I carry on, and say, ‘Thank you very much, what’s next?’”

This August, he returned to the Royal Ballet’s grand home in Covent Garden for Carlos Acosta: Myths and Modern Masters, a bespoke compilation of five different dance pieces. He particularly loved performing Christopher Bruce's Rooster, a strutting celebration of Swinging Sixties sexuality set to a rollicking Rolling Stones soundtrack. “Oh my god, I could dance Rooster forever,” he enthuses when we meet a few weeks later, a few miles up the road at Sadler’s Wells in North London. The latest Acosta Danza production, an ambitious double bill called Cuban Baroque, will be presented here in early October. “We Cubans have something very unique and authentic, and everything Acosta Danza creates is from that essence and perspective,” he says proudly. “I think that’s what makes us different from other companies like Rambert or NDT (Nederlands Dans Theater).”

At 53, Acosta is still ridiculously fit – he looks as lean and supple as a gazelle – but he doesn’t sentimentalise his longevity as a performer. Though he lifts weights and does high-intensity Tabata workouts, he only submits to serious dance training when he’s planning a return to the stage – the last of which, prior to Myths and Modern Masters, was his 2023 birthday show, Carlos at 50, also at Covent Garden. “I spent an entire year building for Myths and Modern Masters,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s a case of slowly, slowly, slowly, and then the last month is [dancing] every day, and then the body remembers. You have to time it carefully so that you don’t injure yourself.” 

An interview is a dance of a different kind – and hopefully, a less strenuous one than playing the prince in Swan Lake, which Acosta aced on numerous occasions – but he still approaches it with a quiet focus. Small talk is kept until the end of our time together, when I mention a dancer friend who’s nursing a niggling injury. “I bet your friend tells you how when he’s in pain, he still has to go out and [dance] because the show must go on. And how you need to conceal the pain because you’re not allowed to show it,” he says empathetically. 

Still, he’s happy to look back at his challenging childhood, which is recounted in the 2018 film Yuli: The Carlos Acosta Story, based on his 2007 memoir. Acosta grew up in Cuba, the eleventh and youngest child of a truck driver father, whom he has described as “volatile”, and a mother with frail health – she suffered a brain haemorrhage when he was 10. “It would be very irresponsible to try and [equate] my journey [with] others’,” he says today, elegantly distinguishing his backstory from other rags-to-riches tales. “They couldn't even comprehend what it is [like] to be eating your pet rabbit.”

This really happened – the Acostas were very poor, and his mother had mouths to feed. The young Carlos wanted to be a sportsman – “bloody football!” he says today – but his calling materialised at nine years old when his father enrolled him at dance school, partly for the free lunch, but mainly to keep him off the streets of Havana. “I had a winning ticket in terms of my talent,” Acosta recalls. “Whenever I [would] dance, people [would] clap for me. I loved that. For the first time, I was somebody.” At this point, Acosta asked himself the questions that went on to define his life: ‘What if I really take this [opportunity] to the fullest and give it my best shot? What if I can do this for me and my family?’

Jumper & trousers DIOR; vest stylist’s own; trainers ONITSUKA TIGER; unicorn brooch GOOSSENS

Spoiler: he took it, and he really could. When he was 16, Acosta won the Prix de Lausanne, an internationally renowned competition for young ballet dancers, which led to an offer from English National Ballet. But when he first moved to London in 1991, he hated the weather and didn’t speak English, then suffered a debilitating ankle injury that left him “depressed”. So he went back to Cuba for a bit, feeling down but not out, before finding his feet in all senses at a ballet company in Houston. In 1998, he returned to the UK to join The Royal Ballet, in that history-making appointment as the company’s first Black principal.

From this point on, his dance career was consistently glittering. He remained with The Royal Ballet for 17 years, and made history again in 2006 as the first Black dancer to appear as Romeo on its stage. He also became the first foreign dancer ever to be a guest principal at Moscow’s illustrious Bolshoi Ballet. Today, he says that simple “perseverance” is his greatest trait.“I keep at it, I keep at it, and I don’t let go,” he adds plainly. “You know, I started writing a book, and it took me 10 years, but I finished it. The same with learning English.” Though he found the UK difficult at first, he’s now called it home for 28 years and has a CBE for services to ballet. These days, he lives in Somerset with his wife, Charlotte, and their three daughters.

Acosta is also honest but on-message when discussing the challenges faced by Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB), which he has guided as director since 2020. Running a major ballet company in 2026 involves constant “uncertainty”, he says, and some pretty existential questions. “How can we sustain the orchestra?” he ponders, by way of example. “You know, a ballet [company] as it should be, touring to Plymouth or Southampton or wherever, how long can we survive like that until we start to make reductions in the orchestra, reductions in personnel, reductions in bringing bold new ballets to the stage like Black Sabbath?”

He’s referring to BRB’s big hit Black Sabbath – The Ballet, which was billed as the “world’s first heavy metal dance experience” when Acosta commissioned it in 2023. “As a company, you can’t just do the same three or four productions because they always sell,” he says. BRB’s latest season includes a timely re-staging of Sir Peter Wright’s Swan Lake – Wright, the company’s former director, turns 100 this year – but also The Maiden of Venice, Acosta’s clever new reimagining of La Bayadère.

The latter ranks as one of the great classical ballets – “it's like Swan Lake,” Acosta says reverentially – but is now tainted by the “stigma” of cultural appropriation. First performed at Russia’s Imperial Ballet in 1877, this tale of ill-fated lovers in ancient India is seen by many as a patronising Orientalist fantasy. Acosta’s ingenious fix is to transfer the action to Renaissance Venice, which will set the necessary religious tension – traditional Catholicism, rather than the original’sHinduism – to an equally sumptuous backdrop. “With the carnival and the gondolas, I think it will have the same spectacle and element of escapism,” he says. 

The latest Acosta Danza production, Cuban Baroque, is also a daring blend. It pairs Pearls, a new work from Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadakis, with Chacona, a popular piece by Spanish ballet great Goyo Montero. Each has a personal resonance for Acosta – he and Foniadakis have “been trying for a long time to work together”, and he gave the latter its UK premiere at Birmingham in 2021. “Chacona has live musicians on stage, and for Acosta Danza to [afford] that is very hard, because we have a very modest budget,” he says. “But I wanted to make a statement about escalating [our offering] to show we can be competitive with the larger companies.”

As ever, Acosta sees being bold as the key to success. This, perhaps, is what he really means by having to keep moving. But when he does look back, what does he feel most proud of? “You know, for all that I have lived in my life, I didn’t lose my head. I didn’t bow down to any temptation that could destroy me or my career,” he says. “My life could have gone in any direction – drugs, God knows. But I ended up alright. I have friends and family, people that love me. And I’ll probably look back at this stage as one of the happiest.”

Acosta Danza: Cuban Baroque will run at Sadler’s Wells from October 7 to 10 and will continue touring the UK in 2027. Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake will transfer to Sadler’s Wells from October 28 to 31.