I first saw Cristina Hamel when I was a petit rat and I would sneak a look at the soloists during rehearsals, crouching behind a pillar. I remember her rehearsing unrelentingly a diagonal of pirouettes that wouldn't turn out well, in Act II of Swan Lake. I was admiring her bow-shaped legs, the academic shape of her arms, her concentration on the coherence of the libretto, and the psychological finesse of the role. She had graduated from the Choreography High School in 1959, where she had studied under Anton Romanowsky, Gelu Matei and Lulu Ross, and at that time her career was in full swing. She had made her debut at 18 playing Maria from The Fountain of Baccisarai, and for 23 years she remained faithful to the same stage. Although lacking the spectacular amplitude of movement at a time when Magdalena Popa had implemented this standard, Cristina Hamel would build her personages with intelligence and thoroughness. She did not stick to a certain typology – she would dance everything, classical ballets (The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, Swan Lake), demi-character (Don Quixote) or dramatic (Miss Nastasia, Spartacus, The Miraculous Mandarin) roles, but also bubbly waltzes as in Viennese Night or Vivaldi's dreamy Seasons. Coming from a noble family of intellectuals, she was an impassioned concert and museum-goer, where she would often meet her colleagues from the theater. "When I created Byzantine Poem set to Doru Popovici's music for her," Alexa Mezincescu remembers, "I brought her painting albums, and she invited me to her place, where she had an impressive collection of icons painted on glass. Like her entire generation, she was a passionate artist who never let anything pass by."After her retirement from the stage in 1980 and her emigration to Germany, I continued to come across her name in specialized magazines announcing master classes and training courses in France, Italy, the Czech Republic or Germany. She had become a ballet maestro and an internationally acknowledged pedagogue, and companies such as those from La Scala in Milan, Atterballetto in Reggio Emilia, or the Opera Houses in Bonn, Berlin, or Duesseldorf often invited her for training.Settled in Germany, in recent years she has entirely dedicated herself to pedagogy at the Music and Dance Conservatory in Cologne. In parallel, she continued to create opera ballets and choreographic miniatures, and figure in the juries of the International Dance Contests of Grasse, Valenciennes, Toulouse or Lima.Cristina Hamel, whom I met again last summer, among the stars of the Bucharest Opera Ballet awarded the Knight Rank Faithful Service National Order by President Iliescu, is a very distinguished person that radiates warmth and harmony. She never talks about herself, but is interested in all that is happening around. In her presence, one seems more aware of what one looks like, says, or how one moves – especially how one moves…
by Vivia Săndulescu
