Alicia Alonso- Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad del Cobre Martínez Hoya

Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad del Cobre Martínez Hoya (born December 21, 1920), simply known as Alicia Alonso, is a Cuban prima ballerina assoluta and choreographer. She is considered a legend and is most famous for her portrayals of Giselle and Carmen.[2]. Since she was nineteen, Alicia was afflicted with an eye defect and was partially blind. Her partners always had to be in the exact place she expected them to be, and she used lights in different parts of the stage to guide her.



Early life
Alonso was born in Havana, Cuba. She was the only daughter of an army officer and his wife. The family was financially comfortable and lived in a fashionable section of the then-vibrant capital. Alonso indicated at a very early age an affinity for music and dance - her mother could occupy her happily for long periods with just a phonograph, a scarf, and some records, she started dancing at the age of nine and started her ballet studies at Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical in Havana with Sophie Fedorova, a year later performed publicly for the first time in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. Alonso danced in Cuba under the name of Alicia Martínez.

The dancer's rapid progress in her lessons came to an abrupt halt in 1937, when the 15-year-old fell in love with and married a fellow ballet student, Fernando Alonso, that's when she changed to last name to Alonso. The new couple moved to New York City, hoping to begin their professional careers there and found a home with relatives in the Spanish Harlem section of the city. Alonso soon gave birth to a daughter, Laura, but managed to continue her training at the School of American Ballet and take private classes with Leon Fokine, Alexandra Fedorova,Enrico Zanfretta, and Anatole Vilzak. She then arranged to travel to London to study for a time with the renowned Vera Volkova. Meanwhile, her husband had joined the new Mordkin Ballet Company in New York. Since she was nineteen, Alicia was afflicted with an eye defect and was partially blind. Her partners always had to be in the exact place she expected them to be, and she used lights in different parts of the stage to guide her.


[edit] Alonso's professional debut
While in New York, Alicia danced in the musicals Great Lady (choreographed by George Balanchine) in 1938 and Stars in Your Eyes in 1939. She was a soloist with American Ballet Caravan in 1939 and 1940. Perhaps discouraged by this less-than-auspicious beginning, Alonso sent Laura back to her family in Cuba, determined to remove all distractions from her training. She and Fernando embarked upon a stringent and unrelenting physical regime and vigilantly scoured all opportunities for their big break into the world of ballet. Dancer Agnes de Mille had become a friend of the couple at this point and later recalled wondering how the Alonsos could put themselves through such grueling pain and sacrifice. Meanwhile, the dancer joined the American Ballet Caravan as a soloist in 1939 and stayed with the company when it became the New York City Ballet in 1940. Occasionally, Alonso would return to Cuba to dance as prima ballerina with Havana's Teatro Pro-Arte.

In 1941 Alonso was one of the founding members of the American Ballet Theatre (at that time called Ballet Theatre)[3]. In 1941, the new Ballet Theater chose Alonso as a dancer for its corps de ballet, a group of dancers who performed together in a company. As part of this job, she had to do 90 minutes of demanding exercises every morning in the company class, but Alonso chose to take a second class at another school later in the day as well. Each night before her performance, she would do an elaborate warm-up routine coached by Fernando, after which she would go to her dressing room, dry off, and get into her costume. Accounts from this period say that Alonso would go on to give brilliant performances, but de Mille eventually chastised her friend for continuing the harsh regimen. Alonso reportedly replied that she had to continue in order to "get strong." In fact, the intense work had changed the dancer's body so that her immense strength and capability were obvious.

Critics began to take notice and wrote rave reviews of the ballerina they called a rising star. While with American Ballet Theatre, Alonso created leading roles in Antony Tudor's Undertow (1943), and George Balanchine's Themes and Variations (1947). Because of Nora Kaye's illness, Alonso danced the premier of de Mille's Fall River Legend in 1948. While in American Ballet Theatre she worked with Mikhail Fokine, George Balanchine, Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, and de Mille, among other relevant choreographers of our century. From that moment, her career flourished as she started dancing leading roles of masterpieces from the Classical and Romantic repertory. Her partnership with Igor Youskevitch was one of the great teams and together with him she joined Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo in 1955. Alonso performed leading roles in important world premieres such as Undertow, Fall River Legend, and Theme and Variations. As a member of ABT, she performed as a principal dancer in various European and American countries.


[edit] Vision Problems
After seeing the doctor for worsening vision problems, Alonso was diagnosed in 1941 with a detached retina. She had surgery to correct the problem and was ordered to lie in bed motionless for three months to allow her eyes to heal. Unable to comply completely, Alonso practiced with her feet alone, pointing and stretching to, as she put it, "keep my feet alive." When the bandages came off, Alonso was dismayed to find that the operation had not been completely successful. The doctors performed a second surgery, but its failure caused them to conclude that the dancer would never have peripheral vision. Finally, Alonso consented to a third procedure in Havana, but this time was ordered to lay completely motionless in bed for an entire year. She was not permitted to play with Laura, chew food too hard, laugh or cry, or move her head. Her husband sat with her every day, using their fingers to teach her the great dancing roles of classical ballet. From Women in World History, Alonso later recalled of that period, "I danced in my mind. Blinded, motionless, flat on my back, I taught myself to dance Giselle."

Finally, she was allowed to leave her bed, although dancing was still out of the question. Instead, she walked with her dogs and, against doctor's orders, went to the ballet studio down the street every day to begin practicing again. Then, just as her hope was returning, Alonso was injured when a hurricane shattered a door in her home, spraying glass splinters onto her head and face. Amazingly, her eyes were not injured. When her doctor saw this, he cleared Alonso to begin dancing, figuring that if she could survive an explosion of glass, dancing would do no harm.


[edit] Back to Work at Last
Nearly mad with impatience and still partially blind, Alonso traveled back to New York in 1943 to begin rebuilding her skills. However, before she had barely settled, out of the blue she was asked to dance Giselle to replace the ballet Theater's injured prima ballerina. Alonso accepted and gave such a performance that the critics immediately declared her a star. She was promoted to principal dancer of the company in 1946 and danced the role of Giselle until 1948, also performing in Swan Lake, Anthony Tudor's Undertow (1943), Balanchine's Theme and Variations (1947), and in such world premieres as deMille's dramatic ballet Fall River Legend (1948), in which she starred as the Accused. By this time in her career, she had developed a reputation as an intensely dramatic dancer, as well as an ultra-pure technician and a supremely skilled interpreter of classical and romantic repertories.

Alonso's longtime dance partnership with the Ballet Theater's Igor Youskevitch has been compared to that of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Youskevitch and her other partners quickly became expert at helping Alonso conceal her handicap. To compensate for only partial sight in one eye and no peripheral vision, the ballerina trained her partners to be exactly where she needed them without exception. She also had the set designers install strong spotlights in different colors to serve as guides for her movements. Alonso knew, for instance, that if she stepped into the glow of the spotlights near the front of the stage, she was getting too close to the orchestra pit. There was also a thin wire stretched across the edge of the stage at waist height as another marker for her, but in general she danced within the encircling arms of her partners and was led by them from point to point. Audiences were reportedly never the wiser as they watched the prima ballerina.


[edit] A New Endeavor in Havana
Alonso's desire to develop ballet in Cuba led her to returned to Havana in 1948 to found her own company, the Alicia Alonso Ballet Company, which she maintained with little financial support, this company eventually became Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Fernando was general director of the company, which was at that time composed mainly of Ballet Theater dancers temporarily out of work due to a reorganization in the New York company. Fernando's brother Alberto, a choreographer, served as artistic director for the company.

The company debuted briefly in the capital and then departed for a tour of South America. The performances were a hit with audiences everywhere, but Alonso found herself funding the company with her savings to keep it going despite donations from wealthy families and a modest subsidy from the Cuban Ministry of Education. Meanwhile, she commuted between Havana and New York to recruit the world's best teachers to train her new students. She remained a sought-after prima ballerina during this hectic time, dancing twice in Russia in 1952 and then producing and starring in Giselle for the Paris Opera in 1953.

Between 1955 and 1959, Alicia danced every year with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo as guest star. She was the first dancer of the Western Hemisphere to perform in the Soviet Union, and the first American representative to dance with the Bolshoi and Kirov Theaters of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) respectively in 1957 and 1958. During the decades to follow Alicia Alonso had cross-world tours through West and East European countries, Asia, North and South America, and she danced as guest star with the Opera de Paris, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Bolshoi and with other companies.[1] She has staged her versions of Giselle, Pas de Quatre, and Sleeping Beauty for the Paris Opera. She also staged Giselle at the Vienna State Opera and the San Carlo Theater of Naples, Italy; La Fille Mal Gardee at the Prague State Opera, and Sleeping Beauty at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.


[edit] Political Change in Cuba
By the mid-1950s, the Alicia Alonso Ballet Company was in dire straits financially and politically. A dictator, Fulgencio Batista, had taken control and was determined to quash the heavy opposition to his rule. Supported by the island's financial infrastructure, the Mafia, and American business interests, he mercilessly repressed anyone who stood in his path. Declaring that all artists and intellectuals were left-wing sympathizers, he drastically cut what little funding the government had given Alonso's ballet school and touring group. Forced to work in nightclubs to earn a living, the dancers often had no energy to perform for Alonso. As the dancer became increasingly vocal in her disdain for Batista, the regime offered her five hundred dollars a month in perpetuity to stop her criticism. Disgusted, she folded her school in 1956 and joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo with Yousevitch.

Alonso worked with the Ballet Rousse until 1959, during which time she performed in a 10-week tour of the Soviet Union, dancing in Giselle, the Leningrad Opera Ballet's Path of Thunder, and other pieces. Her performances earned her the coveted Dance Magazine Award in 1958.


[edit] Return to Cuba
When Fidel Castro took power from the Batista dictatorship on January 1, 1959, Castro vowed to increase funding to the nation's languishing cultural programs. Encouraged by this sudden change and eager to see her homeland again, Alonso returned to Cuba and in March 1959 received $200,000 in funding to form a new dance school, to be called the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, along with a guarantee of annual financial support. She officially founded the school in 1960, and within several years her dancers were winning international dance competitions.

Alonso felt strongly that she and her ballet school were "very much part of the Cuban revolution." She wanted her dancers to bring the beauty and excitement of ballet to the island nation's workers and farmers who had virtually no experience with artistic expression. She and her dancers even helped to bring in the crops from the fields, Alonso wearing a wide Vietnamese worker's hat as a political statement.


[edit] Disappeared from American Artistic Scene
Because of her intense and passionate affiliation with the new communist government in Havana, American audiences turned their backs on the prima ballerina and she vanished from the country's cultural radar. However, her company continued to build its prowess and achievements in both Eastern and Western Europe. In 1967 and 1971 she performed in Canada, where reviewers noted that Alonso was still the greatest ballerina of her time. When the Vietnam War ended and Richard Nixon left the presidency, Alonso was permitted to perform again in the United States in 1975 and 1976. An American reviewer said of the dancer, then 54 years old and a grandmother, "she creates more sexual promise than ballerinas half her age." The state-run Cuban film industry made a film containing all of Alonso's repertoire, but in American ballet circles she had been all but forgotten.


Ballet Nacional de Cuba performing in the Great Theater of Havana
[edit] Ended Days of Dancing and Beyond Alonso's career
Alonso danced solos in Europe and elsewhere well into her 70s, although her near blindness became increasingly apparent. In 1995, she and a number of other aging National Ballet members performed in San Francisco in a piece called In the Middle of the Sunset.

Alonso continued to serve as the director of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in the early twenty-first century. Numerous books have been written on the ballerina, including Alicia Alonso: At Home and Abroad (1970), Alicia Alonso: The Story of a Ballerina (1979), Alicia Alonso: A Passionate Life of Dance (1984), and Alicia Alonso: First Lady of the Ballet (1993). During a November 2003 on-stage interview prior to a Cuban National Ballet performance in San Diego, California, she exclaimed, "I'm so happy to be here. And I'm happy whenever I'm on the stage. The stage is where a dancer should be, even if it's only to walk or sit. I am at home on the stage."

As director and leading dancer of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, Alicia Alonso has been an inspiration and guide to the new generations of Cuban dancers. With her own consummate style, she has left her mark on the international world of dance. Some of her former and more famous students are now dancing at the American Ballet Theatre, the Boston Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, the Washington Ballet, the Cincinnati Ballet and the Royal Ballet, among others. She has created her own works including La Tinaja, Ensayos Sinfonicos, and Lidia. She appeared in a feature-length documentary made in Cuba about her and her work Alicia (1977). She has served on juries at international dance competitions in Bulgaria, Russia, Japan, Brazil, and the United States.

In June 2002 she was designated UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for her outstanding contribution to the development, preservation and popularisation of classical dance and for her devotion to the art-form, through which she has promoted the ideals of UNESCO and the fellowship of the world’s peoples and cultures.

She continues to direct her Ballet Nacional de Cuba, even though she is in her eighties and almost blind.