Carla Forte & Alexey Taran: Life as Improv

Carla and Alexey have been part of the Miami Light Project family of artists since they were first commissioned for the Here & Now Festival over a decade ago, presenting multiple dance, film and hybrid projects since. This year they became one of the AIR (Artist in Residence) at the Light Box creators, receiving support and rehearsing at the Wynwood space.

Their fluid, immersive sensibility fascinates executive director Beth Boone.

“I find Alexey and Carla to be the quintessential artists in that there’s no separation between their daily lives and their artmaking,” Beth says. “If they’re cooking, caring for their dogs, or having dinner with their family, a film is being created in Carla’s head and choreography is being planned out in Alexey’s brain.”

Carla and Alexey have been on the move for much of their lives. Born in Cuba, Alexey, 49, trained at the National Ballet School and danced with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba and then with Danza Abierta, the island’s leading modern dance company. At the end of 1991 he moved to Caracas, Venezuela after joining a dance festival there. Although it was the start of Cuba’s Special Period, a time of immense economic hardship and disruption, Alexey says he stayed primarily to launch his own company and work in Caracas’s then vibrant dance scene. He met Carla teaching at the city’s Universitario de Danza, where she was a student. They soon bonded artistically and personally.

“In the beginning we didn’t think about a relationship – it happened as we started working together,” says Carla, 38. “You share your life, you share amazing moments – it’s deeper. It’s not just that we fell in love. It’s also about the respect and admiration we have for each other.”

For years they did satisfying creative work in improvisation and dance, and in 2005 they launched Bistoury, their hybrid dance/ performance company. But soon growing violence and dwindling funding sent them to New York, where Alexey had received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, as a Cuban, could become a legal resident. They moved to Miami in 2007.

The shifts from country to country (they’ve also lived or worked in Europe and Latin America) honed their improvisational creative and survival instincts.

“Your feelings and knowledge, you always have it with you whether you live in Venezuela or New York,” says Alexey. “It’s very hard to live in another country as an immigrant. We are always trying to survive and adapt as an artist to these different systems and ways of living. It’s a constant metamorphosis.”