Ballerina overcame near-blindness and turned Cuba into a powerhouse of dance
Alicia Alonso, who has died aged 98, was one of the 20th century’s greatest ballerinas, an iconic, sometimes tyrannical figure who made Cuba’s ballet a world force. It was long said that Cuba had three chief exports: cigars, sugar and Alicia Alonso. She was one of the small handful of dancers generally accepted as a prima ballerina assoluta, alongside the Britons Margot Fonteyn and Alicia Markova, and the Russian Maya Plisetskaya – yet for almost all of her career Alonso was classifiable as blind.
Stricken with detached retinas when only 19, and severely visually handicapped for the rest of her life, she defied all prognoses to become a legendary virtuoso and stylist in a performing career that lasted more than half a century.
She also vigorously put her talents to the cause of her native ballet, turning the Caribbean island into a powerhouse of classical ballet.
There was, however, a darker side to the achievement, since Alicia Alonso frustrated the careers of many of her favourites, in what was increasingly seen as an eccentric and regressive artistic approach reflecting an oppressive political regime. Many Cubans defected on foreign tours, populating the world with fine dancers looking for wider and more authentic repertoire to dance than Alonso’s dubious productions.
Alonso’s background was unusual for a major ballerina, in that she was largely selftrained. She was born Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad del Cobre Martinez y del Hoyo in Havana, the youngest of four children. Her father was a vet in the Cuban army’s stables. Her mother ran the only Havana cultural society, the Pro-Arte, where a Russian, Nikolai Yavorsky, was the director of ballet classes.
Aged 13, Alicia danced the lead in Coppelia alongside a schoolmate, Alberto Alonso, whose elder brother Fernando, also a dancer, fell in love with her. When she was 15 she became pregnant by him. They decided, along with Alberto, to seek work in New York, where the baby, Laura, was born in 1938.
While the Alonso brothers immediately found ballet jobs, the teenaged Alicia danced in Broadway shows while taking advanced ballet lessons. Finally she successfully joined the corps de ballet of the new Ballet Theatre, the New York company emerging around the talents stranded in the US by war in Europe.
It was a golden era in American ballet: the great choreographers of the old Ballets Russes, such as Leonide Massine, Michel Fokine and George Balanchine, were joined during the war by the British choreographers Antony Tudor and Frederick Ashton, and by Markova.
Alicia Alonso, in illustrious company at only 19, was instantly noted for her ferocious work ethic. Within months, however, her sight problems began and, after operations in New York and Havana, she was ordered to lie still for a year with her eyes bandaged. Doctors told her she could not expect to dance again, but her husband helped her to learn the leading classical roles by visualising choreography and sensing it with her fingers and in her immobile body.
When she could finally get up, she returned to Ballet Theatre and, within months, made her breakthrough by stepping in for the injured Markova in the role of Giselle, alongside Markova’s celebrated partner, Anton Dolin. Her fellow cast members, along with Fernando Alonso, helped to devise a system of strong signal lights and the onstage murmurs of dancers around her to guide her around the stage. Igor Youskevitch, an enduring partner, would click his tongue in warning if she went astray. Despite her handicap, Alonso astonished viewers with her fastidiousness and speed in footwork and her delicacy in movement.
In 1948 she and Fernando returned to Cuba, and first set up a Ballet Alicia Alonso to enable her to tour, but swiftly developed this with the vision of a Cuban national ballet. Alicia’s need for new performing partners resulted in an extraordinary flowering of male dancing on the island.
In 1959, when Fidel Castro’s communists took charge of Cuba, Castro gave her public money for a national ballet, and thenceforward Alonso was his tireless advocate. In a 2004 Daily Telegraph interview she described the qualities that made Cubans so good at ballet: ‘‘First, they have a very good ear for music. And there is an atmosphere here, which makes the muscles warm, you move easily. And rhythm – don’t forget, we are Caribbean, we are mixed, we listen from children to drums and music, to Spanish and African music. And the talent could be anywhere. A family of artists, or a daughter of a miner or taxi-driver.’’
As Cuba became increasingly defensive, she became an autocratic ballet leader, loved and loathed, her vision as limited artistically as it was physically. She continued to dance until she was 74, making an astonishing, charismatic impression in Swan Lake ona British tour even late in her sixties.
Unable to invite new work from outside, she could not stimulate local choreography, and put on classical stagings as she remembered from her early days. Occasionally this delighted ballet historians, but more often the threadbare productions and choreographic values were not the equal of the National Ballet’s exuberant, accomplished dancers. This mismatch led to regular defections on tours, and forceful calls for the aged Alonso to step down. As she passed 90, she remained defiant, claiming that she would live to 200.
In January this year, 60 years after launching the National Ballet of Cuba, the 98-year-old grand dame finally appointed a deputy director, one of her top protegees, the ballerina Viengsay Valdes, who effectively took over the company’s leadership.
She divorced Fernando Alonso in 1974 and married the poet and art critic Pedro Simon Martinez. Her first husband died in 2013, also aged 98; his brother, Alberto, died in 2007 aged 93. Her daughter and second husband survive her.
‘‘The talent could be anywhere. A family of artists, or a daughter of a miner or taxi-driver.’’
Alicia Alonso on the qualities of Cuban ballet