The Becoming is a separate longitudinal work that emerged during the production of Gazing Soft. The first book and documentary follow four adult professional dancers.
Skin and Grace – Episode II
The Becoming
During our time at the Escuela Nacional de Ballet, another possibility emerged. We met senior students, sixteen and seventeen years old, whose training placed them at the threshold between education and professional life. With the authorization of the school and the consent of their parents, we filmed and photographed aspects of their training and spoke with them about discipline, ambition, and the futures they imagined for themselves.
They are not the subjects of the first book and film, which follow four adult professional dancers. Instead, these encounters became the beginning of a separate work.
We first met them as senior students at the Escuela Nacional de Ballet of Havana. In 2027, when they are young adults, we hope to return—with their renewed participation and consent—to see how time, training, choice, fatigue, ambition, and compromise have begun to shape their lives.
This chapter is not about professional identities already established, but about formation: what remains open, what is being chosen, and what is gradually being left behind.
What has endured?
What has changed?
What has been lost, and what has been gained?
If the first work considers grace as lived experience, the second approaches grace as emergence.
Together, the two works form a single arc:
One asks what discipline produces.
The other asks what discipline begins.
They are two portraits of masculinity across time: one in its present tense, the other in its becoming.
