Name: ¿Por qué somos tan estúpidos y no estamos ya bailando?
Author: Igor Yebra

Igor Yebra has spent his life making difficult things look effortless, which is the whole grammar of classical ballet. So there is a bitter logic in the way the Spanish dancer now describes living with multiple sclerosis. The walking is hard, he admits, “but I disguise it with a bit of showmanship, and nobody notices.”

The confession arrives in an autobiography, and Spain’s celebrity press has mostly filed it under heartbreak, leading with his short marriage to television presenter Anne Igartiburu. That framing misses the stranger and more revealing story. Yebra did not only keep a diagnosis from the public. For a while, he kept it from himself.

The first sign was discomfort in his left leg. Two years later, in 2015, a lumbar puncture led to the diagnosis, according to his account as reported by ¡HOLA! and Noticias de Navarra. Yebra did not want to hear it. He was afraid that naming the disease would take him off the stage, so he took the medication he was prescribed and asked nothing more. He found out what he had two more years down the line, he says, only because “a doctor let it slip.”

Read as a performer’s decision rather than a patient’s, the refusal has its own dramaturgy. For a dancer the body is both instrument and text, and a diagnosis is a line that cannot be unsaid once it has been spoken in the room. Yebra kept the scene running by making sure the line was never delivered to him.

“I have always been very reserved, very much so,” he told El País in the interview presenting the book, “and I think one of the reasons I have opened up in this book is that I did not want to, and could not, keep this illness secret any longer.”

Concealment became harder in 2021, when the symptoms grew more evident and a new medication brought side effects that others could see. Today his left leg is the most affected. In a chapter titled simply “I have multiple sclerosis,” he describes an illness that has shown him “cruelly the fragility of the human being,” weakening his body and his capacity for movement, as quoted by Diez Minutos. He adds that he can only receive it with gratitude, because it taught him to value small moments.

That weakening lands on a body with an unusual record. Born in Bilbao and trained at Víctor Ullate’s school in Madrid, Yebra danced as a guest with the Bolshoi, the Kirov, the Australian Ballet and Scottish Ballet, and from 2001 was a permanent guest principal with the ballets of the Bordeaux Opera and the Rome Opera. In 2004 he became the first non-Russian to dance the title role in Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible at the Kremlin. From 2018 until the end of 2020 he was artistic director of Uruguay’s Ballet Nacional Sodre, succeeding Julio Bocca. By his own timeline, he already knew his diagnosis when he took that job, and the public did not.

Now 52, he has been away from the stage for about a decade and works as a choreographer, director and teacher. The book finds him in Montevideo, where he is organising a competition to draw young children into classical dance. Its title reads less like a memoir than an argument: ¿Por qué somos tan estúpidos y no estamos ya bailando? (roughly, Why are we so stupid that we are not dancing already?), published by Bao Bilbao.

Illness memoirs usually sell candour. This one is more interesting because it first documents the opposite, years of skilled concealment by a man trained to hide effort. Yebra concedes the disease is rarely out of his head; only deep concentration at the computer buys him “a few seconds” without it. “Unfortunately,” he says, “my thinking is focused on not deteriorating.”

For a dancer whose career rested on ballet’s oldest illusion, that the body carries no weight, the boldest move in the book may be the least theatrical one: letting the audience watch him walk.

Tags: Anne Igartiburu, ballet dancers, Ballet Nacional Sodre, Igor Yebra, multiple sclerosis