Javier Galitó-Cava is the Artistic Director of the Meisner Technique Program Spain(meisner.es), which he founded after studying at American Conservatory Theatre (A.C.T.)and the Rachael Adler Studio in San Francisco. He travels to Europe, the United States and South America to offer workshops for professional actors. During the 2025-26 season, Galito-Cava worked with stagers and choreographers to coach San Francisco Ballet dancers performing roles in Onegin and Don Quixote. Toba Singer was able to engage in a ZOOM interview conversation with Javier on March 18, 2026.
Toba Singer: A Cuban stage manager, speaking about her touring company’s experience, reported that the very same moments on stage drew silence from an audience in Spain, raucous laughter from a US audience, and moderate amusement from Canadians. What does this say about how to approach the coaching of a comedy such as “Don Quixote”?
Javier Galitó-Cava: I consider the varied reactions a function of cultural richness. Each culture goes by different sets of rules for what’s considered appropriate or inappropriate. That’s what engages varying responses. What has me laughing at a comic moment in a canned Pedro Almodovar film in a theater in Spain will horrify someone else who views it in a theater in the United States. Reactions to live performance touring internationally impart a cautionary secret to the director: do not try to control audience reaction. “Setting up” an audience disallows a true response. The Performing Arts help us connect to our lives, whether we watch them in a ballet, hear them in music, or witness them acted on stage. They touch deep and personal places in us. These correspondences cannot be imposed by a director or anyone. That is why it’s so important to talk with dancers about their characters’ intentions, not their emotions. The dancers themselves come from a variety of backgrounds. They express emotion in different ways according to circumstances. Even the same emotion shows up differently depending upon how we process what we experience. Instead of trying to control the audience, the secret is for the performer to have a clear idea of the arc in telling the story to help them inhabit it, asking what kind of pilgrimage is it on. In every single piece there is that beat that comes with a change in the music, the character, the choreography, or the arc of the story, and changes something in us. We must be clear about what the changes are and where they occur.
TS: By utilizing the set, costumes, and tempi, how does a dancer shape a character to engage the audience’s sense of humor?
JGC: Comedy is drama that carries such high stakes that they become ridiculous to us. Basilio fakes his suicide, a deeply serious moment—suicide—but he transforms it into something comic because of how ridiculous it is in the context. Out of the many comic tropes he could have chosen, he goes for the most ridiculous—faking his own death—right there, in front of his intended. It’s ridiculous what men can at any given moment think is a good idea. In my notes to the dancers playing this role, I wrote, “Even though this is a jest, because in all seriousness he loves her so much that he would die for her, once you opt for it, you stick with it all the way, with all that it encumbers.” So, as he’s doing this, he’s also signaling her [and the audience seeing it through his motivation, not her perspective] that he’s not really doing it. It becomes a co-dependent dog whistle that pleads, “Kitri, don’t take this the wrong way and castigate me for the next 25 years!” We all recognize ourselves in that situation. I [am forced to] recognize myself in every single character’s flawed humanity.
TS: What elements in the music and choreography offer specific keys to unlocking the idiosyncrasies defining each of the roles?
JGC: Because musical preference is such a creature of personal taste, and the same piece of music can spark so many different emotions in different people, I listen to the music to react, and see what it is for me personally, and then set it aside as just a point of view that inches the director toward how he wants to tell the story. Take care not to let what is for some, the most salient element, dictate the arc. For example, you don’t start the story of Little Red Riding Hood with how dark it is in the wolf’s stomach. The music, choreography, costumes, and set, are there to help the storyteller tell it their way. I take in the choreographic choices as they respond to that moment of music and build a bridge between it and the dancers, to facilitate them elaborating an intention.
TS: At this point, you could run afoul of the stager, should opinions conflict. How much juice can you expect to find—or introduce—into the stager’s work and relationship with the cast?
JGC: As creators, the choreographers and stagers speak in their own language, and I mean, literally. Their mother tongue may be of Scandinavian or Eastern European derivation, for example. What each of you is trying to convey in your own mother tongue may get lost in translation because language differences reflect how complicated we are as human beings. I like to sit with the director and ask certain questions. In “Onegin,” for example, to get at the narrative and structure, I’ll ask, “Could you walk me through the narrative, in the order you see it unfolding on stage?” Their words offer specific information about how they see the emotional truth in that scene. In Onegin, the opening scene is of a funeral that messages emancipation. We immediately know that there’s something important having to do with the freedom associated with coming of age while at the same time, exposing a character’s first-time experience with mortality. Both give me needed details.
I might ask whether there are moments when the choreography prioritizes mood or atmosphere over literal storytelling? Is the season in which the work is set a tool for advancing the artistry? How can we use these to help the corps de ballet members inhabit its frames? It’s critical to make sure that everyone understands that their role is needed. One delves into the emotional truth by asking, “Are there specific contrasts: passion v. restraint, belonging v. isolation? What emotional settings or levels do you want the dancers to register and embody? These are not easy to answer but they force you to reflect upon your own work. Naming them gives them weight, visibility, perspective, and prioritizes them.
TS: It sounds like you talked through each beat in each scene. It’s a collaboration but doesn’t it also harbor confrontational aspects?
JGC: That’s all part of the artistry. It all comes down to listening. I don’t need to agree; I need to understand. I’m here to tell the story as you see and understand it. I will push hard if I don’t understand. I must understand their process.
TS: I once worked with a director who told us, “If you cry, the audience won’t.” If you agree, do you think that the same can be said about laughter? What makes laughter such perilous territory for an actor or dancer?
JGC: That’s a two-part question with a two-part answer. I would say that I agree with your director, to a certain extent, if by you crying or laughing, you’re going for the result. But if you are trying to accomplish something, and in the doing of that something, it brings tears or laughter, and that renders that emotion truthful, the audience will connect. I had a teacher who once said, “Our most important job on stage is giving the audience the opportunity to rehearse their own lives.” If they don’t recognize it, if they are not touched by your character, they won’t react either by laughing or crying.
The second part of the answer has to do with heavy dramas, you must introduce moments which I call “the coughing moments,” the elements of release. There is only so much the actor, as his or her own instrument, can hold before breaking. It is your job to introduce where the audience, as a body, releases. Failure to do that results in those distracting audience coughs, or the crinkle of cellophane being exactingly stripped from a piece of candy. You’ll see that such release moments are choreographed by the director. If that’s not part of the direction, the audience will have to find their own release, and you’ll have the distraction of all the above plus nervous laughter, that becomes nerve-wracking.
TS: Can you profile what endows a dancer with a special gift for comedy?
JGC: There are a couple of things that very much make comedy come naturally or not. Culture is one of them, as are a sense of shame and guilt. You come from a Jewish background; I come from a Catholic one, and in the Judeo-Christian community, we’re supposed to feel both shame and guilt to prove to that community that we’re good and worthy people. If you happen not to be attached to those values, comedy may not be your forte. If you are unwilling to be that fool, then comedy may exceed your reach. It may strike some as generic, but our job as teachers, directors, and supporters of the arts, is to give artists permission to be fools: human, flawed, ridiculous, and worthy of the shame that comes with the package. It’s a part of my job to give these artists license to be fools and to commit to what the story is crying out for them to be, just as fully as the story is bursting at the seams to be told. Talent helps them go there, naturally, but talent only accounts for about 15 percent of what you deliver; the rest depends on willingness to do the work and inhabit the creation. It can be an uncomfortable habitat. In ballet, the challenge is even more demanding. Ballet’s controlling argument is that this art form was created to showcase perfection, an ideal, and without us realizing it, that imperative can rob dancers of permission to do anything but that.
TS: What dance works would you most like to coach, and why?
JGC: There are a couple of things I’d love to work on: As a classic piece of repertoire, Manon Lescaut and Romeo & Juliet (with music by Prokofiev.) What a challenge William Forsythe’s “In the Middle Somewhat Elevated,” would pose to help dancers embody a piece that’s not linear, that’s abstract—a conceptual piece.
TS: I’ve heard dancers say about Forsythe that he’s a pleasure to work with, so nice a human being that he is able to extract things from you that you didn’t think were there.
JGC: What makes him a pleasure to work with is his curiosity. Curiosity keeps us affirming that we don’t know everything. It keeps us fresh and humble. If we think we’ve got it all worked out, we cease being curious. We already have all the answers. That presents a problem because they won’t listen to you. There was a time in my 30s, when I thought of myself as a radical. In retrospect, it now looks to me like much of that was reactionary. I was content with being the leaves on the tree that make a lot of noise instead of going to the root and feeding the tree. Curiosity keeps you alive, fresh and engaged, and makes you a person I want to work with because you are learning alongside me. That’s what people can clumsily call “nice.”
TS: To those who harbor a distant memory of the outstanding among ballet coaches, such as Irina Jacobson or Natalia Dudinskaya, for example, the lost art of coaching tends to be looked upon as a curio, albeit a desirable one. What is different about coaching in the orbit of 2026?
JGC: It’s 2026, and we have become accustomed to a closer and more “personal” reaction to things that are distant from us, expecting things to be tailored to personal taste and us then taking ownership of what occurs on stage. The stage used to be a place where you showcased your status and appreciation of the arts. Now. it’s more about the experience of what’s happening on stage, not whether your character is wearing a tie and tails, but is instead rehearsing your own life, your connection to work you’re privy to. Because audiences feel freer to express themselves, that audience also contributes each night to how what’s on stage is being told. The audience is also another rhythm, and artists have learned to listen to the audience in a broader way than they have for centuries. This started germinating sometime between World Wars I and II and specifically in the forties and fifties. Realism and naturalism became the coin of the realm. We wanted no more faking; we wanted to recognize ourselves in the tribulations and challenges of the character on stage.
TS: That’s a big statement. Is it geographically big, global? Or is it limned, as you said earlier, by acculturation?
JGC: It’s Occidental, very much a Western thing found in Europe, North America, and starting to happen in Central and South America. Caught short, because of the shock of a barbaric Holocaust betraying what we had accorded as the modern world.
TS: How awful is this, given our conquest of rationalism, technology, all that is considered progressive that has contributed to changing how we live and relate. Despite all that, come the horrors.
JGC: Yes, and we saw growth of the ridiculous, Theater of the Absurd, Dadaism, Situationism, Cubism. The aesthetic of abstraction is thereby born and takes hold. The quest for truth on stage turned into shared doubting. You see interest in existentialism, which the French turned into an art form. Every big “ism” ignites the why, how, and what of existence. World War II marked the beginning of globalization. World War I was the first public war, owing to advances in technology and communication. The second was the same on steroids. The audience was no longer the object, but the subject, along with who was on stage. Artists are not special humans; they are humans who take the risk of putting life onstage for everyone to witness and experience.
We found a way to keep that unchecked, until now. Schisms have us asking ourselves why, what, how, and we ran away from answers that proposed as “truth” explanation via platitude, and pushing against that to find new answers to the same old questions.
TS: Are you making the argument that coaching fine-tunes the touchstones derived from history, experience, and irony, such that they become a harbinger for for curating curiosity? Does today’s audience leave the theater with more questions than answers?
JGC: Yes, they were left as questions, not answers. Art in this period is obliged to provide an audience with questions of an eternal nature. Answers have an expiration date. But the questions remain with us. On my desk, I keep these two quotes, one by the choreographer Agnes DeMille, the other by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Agnes DeMille puts it this way, “Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything, live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
