At nearly 90, the ballet diva Alicia Alonso is a living legend – Donald Hutera talks to her as she brings her Ballet Nacional de Cuba to the region.
Interviewing Alicia Alonso, the artistic director of Ballet Nacional de Cuba, is akin to arranging an audience with the president.
Indeed, as the ballet superstar Carlos Acosta has written that the power this legendary woman wields within her native land can only be compared to that role.
Alonso founded Ballet Nacional more than 60 years ago, having already made a name for herself in New York working both on Broadway and with the likes of iconic dance figures like George Balanchine and Agnes de Mille.
While still in her twenties, the acclaimed ballerina returned to Cuba to start up its first serious ballet school and in the process she helped turn this island nation into one of the world’s great centres of classical dance.
Alonso and her stellar company are about to perform in Birmingham for the first time as part of the company’s first ever UK tour with Acosta as its headline attraction.
We meet in her office, cool and blue-tinted as the baking sun filters through the coloured glass of the windows. She sits behind a desk in a purple headscarf, her mouth a red gash of lipstick and a bangle on her wrist (a gift, she notes, from the Royal Ballet director Monica Mason).
Nearly 90, this ballet diva is a Cuban institution. She only stopped dancing in the early 1990s despite having been virtually blind for much of her remarkable career. This is reputedly one of the reasons Cuban males make such superbly attentive partners – their careful handling of Alonso became a technique.
Half a century ago, at the dawn of the Revolution and with Fidel Castro’s complete support, she was ready to bring ballet to the masses.
Cuba can now boast some of the most passionately informed dance audiences on the planet. But most importantly, Alonso stresses, she and her colleagues were on a mission to find and nurture young talent. The process continues.
“We pick out children from all over Cuba,” she explains, “bring them here to Havana and teach them in our school. And it is for free. This doesn’t happen all over the world.”
Just outside her office in Ballet Nacional’s studios the dancers are either taking class or rehearsing, the young and unseasoned ones thronging together to scrutinise more experienced company members in full flight. They are all, in a sense, Alonso’s thoroughbred offspring.
“I am alive because of this company,” she avows. “The wonderful thing is I was a dancer, so I know all the things they go through. And I feel like I am still dancing with them, with my heart.”
The obvious question is how does a country that is so small manage to churn out so many gifted performers, especially in the field of dance?
Alonso believes it is due to a combination of race, a climate guaranteed to keep dancers’ muscles warm and exceptional training.
“Cuban rhythms go very well with the body,” she adds. “They get deep inside. We are a very expressive people. We speak with our hands, our eyes.”
At one point, asked about her version of Swan Lake, Alonso demonstrates from her seat the stylistic differences between it and Giselle, which the company brings to Birmingham next week and which provided her with her signature role.
It is breathtaking – a mini-master class in expressive arm movement. There is no doubting Alonso’s wealth of knowledge about classical dance, nor the passion that still fuels her.
“You don’t learn to be a dancer because you want to be a great ballerina,” she says. “You don’t work to be a star. There are other, easier ways to become well known. You dance because you love to dance. A dancer has to have something inside, like a…I don’t what you would call it in English…a magnet? Any artist has that inside.
“When the curtain opens you come out, and in that first entrance you have to grab the audience. It is very important that immediately you can feel them and they can feel you. It is a complete connection that keeps you moving and dancing.
“It keeps you going in the role that you’re supposed to dance and reflect, like Giselle. You feel it growing with you into the argument of the story of the ballet. It is fantastic, so emotional.”
Incredibly, Alonso danced Giselle for more than half a century. There is even a plaque beneath the sweeping staircase of the Gran Teatro Garcia Lorca in central Havana that marks the 50th anniversary of her first taking on the role.
She claims to have never tired of it. “Let me tell you why,” she begins. “It’s because the ballet is like life itself. You get into the personality of the role and into the style of the Romantic era, and it is like being in a film. You are inside the picture. And you reflect whatever day you have had. I have never never never danced one ballet the same way,” she says, slapping her desk as she repeats the word. “It is not that I change the steps. It is the expression of my dancing. One day I’m a happier, more alive person and another more sad or settled or down. So that’s the way I would dance that day.”
Despite all that she has achieved, and the reverence in which she is held in Cuba, Alonso voices little patience with her status.
“I don’t know what it is to be a legend,” she says. “I only know that I’m a living human being. And I know that I have met marvellous people. And other people not so good. But the ones that were not so good haven’t done anything to me but give me an experience. And the good people have given me so much belief in humanity that I want to live to 200 years old.”
* Ballet Nacional de Cuba perform Magia de la Danza and Giselle on April 27-May 1 at Birmingham Hippodrome as part of International Dance Festival Birmingham. Tickets: 0844 338 5000 or www.birminghamhippodrome.com
