Alicia Alonso (born Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad del Cobre Martínez del Hoyo; 21 December 1920 – 17 October 2019) was a Cuban prima ballerina assoluta and choreographer whose company became the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in 1955. She is best known for her portrayals of Giselle and the ballet version of Carmen.
From the age of nineteen, Alonso was afflicted with an eye condition and became 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 herself.
Alonso was born "on the outskirts" of Havana in 1920, the fourth child of Antonio Martínez de la Maza Arredondo, lieutenant veterinarian of the army, and Ernestina del Hoyo y Lugo, a dressmaker. Her parents were of primarily northern Spanish descent on both sides. Alonso began dancing as a child. At the age of nine in 1929, the family moved to Spain where Alonso stayed for a year and half, there she studied and learnt typical Spanish dances, such as the Jota, Malagueñas and Sevillanas among others.
In June 1931 returning to Cuba she began studying ballet at Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical in Havana with Nikolai Yavorsky.
She performed publicly for the first time on 29 December 1931, aged 11. Her first serious debut was in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty at the Teatro Auditorium on 26 October 1932. Early in her career in Cuba, she danced under the name of Alicia Martínez.
Progress in her lessons came to an abrupt halt in 1937 when Alonso fell in love with a fellow ballet student, Fernando Alonso, whom she married at age 16. The couple moved to New York City, hoping to begin their professional careers. There they found a home with relatives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Riverside Drive. She gave birth to a daughter, Laura, in 1938, but continued her training at the School of American Ballet. In 1938, she made her debut in the U.S., performing in the musical comedies Great Lady and Stars In Your Eyes.
She arranged to travel to London to study with Vera Volkova.
After seeing the doctor for worsening vision problems, Alonso was diagnosed in 1941 with a detached retina and had surgery to correct the problem. Following the operation, she was ordered to have bed rest for 3 months so her eyes could completely heal. Unable to comply fully, Alonso practiced with her feet, pointing and stretching to "keep my feet alive", as she put it. When the bandages came off, she discovered the operation had not been completely successful. After a second surgery was performed, doctors concluded Alonso would never have peripheral vision. She consented to a third procedure in Havana but this time was ordered to have bed rest for an entire year. Her husband sat with her every day, using their fingers to teach her the great dancing roles of classical ballet. She recalled, "I danced in my mind. Blinded, motionless, flat on my back, I taught myself to dance Giselle."
Finally allowed to leave her bed, dancing could still not be considered. Against doctor's orders, she went to the ballet studio down the street every day to practice. 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. Her eyes were not injured. When her doctor saw this, he cleared Alonso to begin dancing, figuring if she could survive an explosion of glass, dancing could do no harm.
Alonso traveled back to New York City 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 Theatre's injured prima ballerina Alicia Markova. Alonso accepted and gave such a performance that the critics immediately declared her a star. "Her vision difficulties helped inspire her interpretation of the role," wrote Barbara Steinberg, daughter of Benjamin Steinberg, Music Director of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba from 1959-1963, in Dance Magazine.
She was promoted to principal dancer of the company in 1946 and danced the role of Giselle until 1948, also performing in Swan Lake, Antony 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 a dramatic dancer, as well as a pure technician and a skilled interpreter of classical and romantic repertories.
The Ballet Theatre's Igor Youskevitch, her other partners, and Benjamin Steinberg 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.
She 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 her dance.
Alonso's desire to develop ballet in Cuba led her to return to Havana in 1948 to found her own company, the Alicia Alonso Ballet Company, supported largely through her fame and earnings. 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. While Alonso was happy with the success of the company, she wanted to showcase more Cuban dancers than non-Cuban dancers, leading her to open a ballet academy in Havana.
Alonso ruled the company with an authoritarian hand. Into her 60s she limited careers of younger dancers whom she regarded as competition to her own dancing career. Combined with the lack of opportunities in Cuba, her behavior led many talented dancers to defect. Founder of the International Ballet Festival of Miami and Cuban Classical Ballet of Miami, Pedro Pablo Peña, had since arriving in Miami in 1980 as a Cuban exile himself, helped numerous defecting Cuban dancers. He said of Alonso's impact:
Alicia Alonso’s work as director of the Ballet Nacional and as prima ballerina put the company on an international level. There is no doubt that she had the greatest dedication. Nothing mattered to her but ballet. But her ego turned her into a tyrant.
Exalted in the ballet world broadly, Cuban exiles reviled her, seeing her as the "cultural equivalent" to Fidel Castro.
She commuted between Havana and New York to recruit teachers to train her new students. She remained a sought-after prima ballerina during this time, dancing twice in Russia in 1952 and then producing and starring in Giselle for the Paris Opéra Ballet in 1953.