Alicia Alonso
Titanic figure in world ballet who overcame near-blindness and made Cuba 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 of today.
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, with the result that today Cuban dancers are among the most soughtafter in world companies.
There was, however, a darker side to the achievement, since Alicia Alonso frustrated the career of many of her favourites, whom she ordained should serve 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. The cannier Cuban emigrants, such as the Royal Ballet’s Carlos Acosta, learnt to stay the right side of Alonso in order to return to their homeland.
Alicia Alonso’s background was unusual for a major ballerina, in that she was largely self-trained. She was born Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad del Cobre Martínez y del Hoyo on December 21 1920 in Havana, the youngest of four children in a Spanish upper-class family. Her father, Dr Antonio Martínez, was a veterinarian in the Cuban army’s stables. Her mother Ernestina 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, but the couple faced opposition from his parents. 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 such as Great Lady, Stars In Your Eyes and Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid, while taking advanced ballet lessons with the New York teachers Anatole Vilzak and Ludmila Schollar.
One of her jobs was with an Ethel Merman musical, and she took her small daughter backstage with her, where Merman loved to pet the toddler. Finally she successfully joined the corps de ballet of the new Ballet Theatre, the major 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 Léonide Massine, Michel Fokine and George Balanchine, were joined during the war by the British choreographers Antony Tudor and Frederick Ashton and the brilliant British ballerina
Alicia Markova.
Alicia Alonso, in illustrious company at only 19, was instantly noted for her ferocious work ethic. “I took classes from every good dancer and every good teacher I could find,” she told the Telegraph in 2004. “I experimented with my own body, I made my own career.”
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 had a narrow escape from death when one of Havana’s frequent hurricanes shattered a porch door, showering her with glass. She escaped without serious injury and returned to Ballet Theatre.
Within months she made her breakthrough, stepping in for the injured Markova in the role of Giselle, alongside Markova’s celebrated partner Anton Dolin. Dolin and her other partners, notably Igor Youskevitch, formulated with Fernando Alonso’s help a system of strong signal lights and the onstage murmurs of dancers around her to guide her around the stage as she danced. 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. She idolised the older Markova, and the two Alicias became friends as well as the two great Giselles of New York.
In 1947 Balanchine created a masterpiece for her, Theme and Variations, a showcase for grand Russian ballerina style that remains her personal monument in the canon. Agnes de Mille and Antony Tudor chose her to lead more dramatic modern creations: she played the axe-murderer Lizzie Borden in de Mille’s Fall River Legend (1948) and Ate in Tudor’s Undertow (1945).
When in 1948 Alicia and Fernando Alonso decided to return to Cuba, they at first set up a Ballet Alicia Alonso to enable her to tour, but swiftly developed this with the vision of a Cuban national ballet. Fernando Alonso formulated a training programme fusing natural Cuban athleticism and musicality with the classical finesse absorbed from the choreographers they had worked with in New York.
Alicia Alonso’s need for new performing partners resulted in an extraordinary flowering of male dancing on the island. “We taught them that a man must dance like a man, and a woman like a woman,” she said. “And when they dance together, there must be a contact between them that reflects to the audience, a fire to dance.”
She had to dissolve her company for some years when General Batista refused to support her plans for a national ballet, and she danced abroad with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo – in 1957 she was the first ballerina of the Americas to perform in the USSR.
However, in 1959, when Fidel Castro’s communist cohorts took charge of Cuba, Castro gave her double the amount of public money she requested, and thenceforward Alonso was his tireless advocate.
The Soviet link which caused Cuba’s political isolation after 1960 was also of signal benefit in ballet. After Alicia Alonso led a triumphant Cuban Ballet tour to the USSR, the Bolshoi Ballet sent a leading male dancer to Cuba as her partner and male coach – Azari Plisetsky, the brother of the Bolshoi’s star ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who requested that Alonso’s brother-in-law Alberto (now a choreographer) should create a new Carmen ballet for her in Moscow.
Alicia asked Alberto to remount the ballet for her in Havana, and as a result Carmen became celebrated in 1967 as the ballet starring two ballerina assolutas simultaneously on either side of the world, reflecting either haughty Russian or sensuous Cuban traits.
In her 2004 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, Alicia Alonso 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 on a British tour even late in her sixties.
Unable to invite new work from outside, due to restrictions on Cuba, she could not stimulate local choreography, and put on classical stagings as she remembered from her early days. Occasionally this delighted ballet historians, Cuba having been bypassed by decades of revisions elsewhere in the world, 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 protegées, the ballerina Viengsay Valdés, who effectively took over the company’s leadership.
Alicia Alonso was much decorated: she held Cuba’s highest achievement award, the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes medal, and was voted by the Cuban Workers’ Union as a National Hero of Labour. The Spanish king Juan Carlos I invested her with the Orden Isabel la Católica, and the Orden de las Artes y las Letras de España. Madrid’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos named its dance institute after her.
Some of her many European awards included the French Légion d’honneur (officier), the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris, the Gold Medal of the Gran Teatro Liceo de Barcelona and the Unesco Pablo Picasso Medal.
She divorced Fernando Alonso in 1974 and married the poet and art critic Pedro Simón Martínez. Her first husband died in 2013, also aged 98; his brother, Alberto, died in 2007 aged 93. Her daughter and second husband survive her.
Alicia Alonso, born December 21 1920, died October 17 2019