No split decision: Acosta is untouchable. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
There is nothing in the dance strand of the Manchester International Festival to match the buzz of premieres like Damon Albarn's Monkey: Journey to the West. The much-vaunted commissioning of Carlos Acosta's Tocororo Suite certainly doesn't live up to the festival's claims of innovation - it's largely a re-packaging of excerpts. Yet I doubt that many who watch Acosta and his ensemble of dancers at the Lowry will care. They will probably be happy to see Acosta whatever his material.
Acosta is a star, one of the few to deserve the title. His life story alone goes a long way to earn him celebrity lustre. Brought up in the slum district of Havana, playing truant from school, he was forced into ballet by his father in a desperate bid to keep him off the streets and out of trouble. By the time he started his international career at the age of 16, he was already a precocious virtuoso - with the kind of careless vaulting jump and smoking pirouettes that only a Cuban training seems to produce. By the late 1990s, he could pretty much choose whichever company he wanted to guest with.
These days, as his artistry deepens and his repertory expands into more dramatic roles, there is arguably no male dancer to touch Acosta for sheer command of the stage. And yet it's his bad luck that despite his exotic, rags-to-riches background and phenomenal talent, he hasn't quite made it to the status of household name. Few male ballet dancers do, at least in the west - Nureyev and Baryshnikov may be the only two in living memory, although Adam Cooper has come close, courtesy of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake and the Billy Elliot film.
Acosta has his many fans, of course, yet compared to the attention he receives in his native Havana, his celebrity hasn't really reached beyond the ballet world in the UK. A few weeks ago, I saw Acosta walking around Islington after some rehearsal or a meeting at Sadler's Wells. He wasn't invisible: any casual passerby might notice the physical burnish of his presence. But it felt odd and a little bit sad that he didn't cause any kind of public stir.
