"Alicia Alonso: Giselle in a Cuban Accent"

In the 1940s, Alicia Alonso became the first Latin American dancer to achieve international prominence in the field of ballet, until then dominated by Europeans.

Alicia Alonso contended that the musicality of Cuban ballet dancers contributed to a distinctive national style in their performance of European classics such as Giselle and Swan Lake. A highly developed sense of musicality distinguished Alonso’s own dancing. For the ballerina, this was more than just an element of her individual style: it was an expression of the Cuban cultural environment and a common feature among ballet dancers from the island. In addition to elucidating the physical manifestations of musicality in Alonso’s dancing, this article examines how the ballerina’s frequent references to music in connection to both her individual identity and the Cuban ballet aesthetics fit into a national discourse of self-representation that deems Cubans an exceptionally musical people. This analysis also problematizes the Cuban ballet’s brand of musicality by underscoring the tension between its possible explanations—from being the result of the dancers’ socialization into a rich Afro-Caribbean musical culture to being a stylistic element that Alonso developed though her training with foreign teachers and, in turn, transmitted to her Cuban disciples.

ARTS MDPI, 2023

Throughout the XX century, the hard-fought battle of blacks and dark-skinned dancers to perform the classical repertoire on professional stages (including “white ballets”) was a part of the struggle for citizens’ equality. Cuba is a clear example of creating a national ballet school in a country where the fight for social equality was closely connected with overcoming racial segregation. But some researchers have noted that the majority of dancers in the Ballet Nacional de Cuba belong to the Caucasoid phenotype, which means they do not represent the Cuban nation which includes a large variety of phenotypes. We pose the question in what way is the history of Cuban ballet and the artistic experience of its founders connected with the struggle of blacks to have professional dancing careers, and is there actually racial discrimination in Cuban ballet? We demonstrate that the Alonso triumvirate was a good indicator of the problem: Alicia and Fernando as performers, and Alberto Alonso as a choreographer, participated in a cultural movement directed at the rebirth of Cuban identity, they performed African American dances, and they worked together with George Balanchine, who adapted black dance and invited black dancers into his company. However, due to various reasons and circumstances, Alicia Alonso, first for herself and then for the Nacional ballet school and theatre, took a different path, that of entering, on equal footing, the domain of classical ballet, of European art in its essence, in which the white aesthetic is inherent. We would like to demonstrate that the main explanation of the paradox of Cuban ballet became the aesthetic dictatorship of the classics, the dictatorship within “white ballet” which is accepted voluntarily. Classical ballet is an art of subordination to rules and images that are thought of as absolute pinnacles.

Dance Research, Vol. 41, No. 2: (207-234), 2023

This article examines a largely neglected chapter of Spanish and Catalan dance history: the attempts to create and develop a dance culture in Catalonia during the first half of the twentieth century, following the visits of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Spain. Two Catalan writers and promoters, Sebastià Gasch and Alfons Puig i Claramunt, were the key figures who sought to position Barcelona alongside other European dance capitals, like London or Paris. Sebastià Gasch was an important art critic and friend of many avant-garde artists, including Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca. His proximity to Paris and its artistic milieu drew him to the writings of André Levinson and Serge Lifar when he started writing about dance. Alfons Puig i Claramunt, an art critic and promoter, noticed how England was developing a thriving dance culture and identified the importance of the writings and active role of Arnold Haskell, who became his model. Gasch and Puig championed their friend Joan Magrinyà, enlisting him in their creative and artistic enterprise. However, unlike what happened in Paris or London, their attempts failed. The emerging narrative shows how the different social and cultural contexts and lack of a serious understanding of ballet as art form prevented their enterprise from overcoming the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of their efforts. Keywords: Sebastià Gasch, Alfons Puig i Claramunt, André Levinson, Arnold Haskell, Joan Magrinyà, Catalan dance history, Spanish dance history

Studies in Musical Theatre, 2019

This article examines Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso and his dance contributions to Cuban musical theatre from the 1940s through the early 1960s. The analysis integrates the histories of Alonso's training, performance career and choreographic output with developments in Cuban musical theatre before and after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. In particular, it focuses on Alonso's 1964 ballet El Solar (The Slum), which became a 1965 musical film Un día en el solar (A Day in the Slum) and live musical Mi Solar (My Slum). I argue that Alonso subtly questioned officialdom with his musical choreography that showed revolutionary movements springing not from the state but from Cuban citizens of different racial backgrounds as they enacted the chores and delights of life. Moreover, Alonso's work challenged cultural hierarchies, which held so-called high art forms like ballet above popular dance, by emphasizing the endless creativity of Cubans moving through their everyday.

Ouvirouver, 2016

The main goal of this study is to examine ballet technique and its presence in Porto Alegre exploring the relationship to European culture. This study includes the trajectory of ballet teaching in the city of Porto Alegre in the 20th century and the relation to the influence of European culture in southern Brazil. The research is characterized as qualitative with the use of bibliographical sources for historical research and interviews with dance teachers for oral history development. The study could detect the predominance of an esthetic ideal and mentality, which originated in the European ballet methodology (especially through the Russian Ballet method), inherited in Brazil through European colonization as well as other migrations. KEYWORDS Dance, history, european culture. RESUMO O principal objetivo deste texto é investigar a técnica do ballet e sua presença em Porto Alegre, explorando sua relação com a cultura europeia. Este estudo inclui a trajetória do ensino do ballet na cidade de Porto Alegre, no século XX, e sua relação com a influência da cultura europeia no sul do Brasil. A pesquisa se caracteriza como qualitativa com o uso de fontes bibliográficas e da história oral, onde foram realizadas entrevistas com professores de ballet. O estudo detectou uma predominância de um ideal estético e uma mentalidade originados na metodologia de ballet europeia (especialmente através do método russo de ballet), herdado, no Brasil, através da colonização europeia e outras migrações.

2022

Los trabajos que recoge esta publicación ponen de relieve la importancia de la danza en el Romanticismo como uno de los hilos conductores del arte y la identidad cultural del siglo XIX, así como su papel en la cultura posterior y, por supuesto, en la danza moderna. Un recorrido a través de los diferentes géneros, influencias y espacios que ocupó la danza española en esta centuria desde una perspectiva interdisciplinar, donde se ha reunido la visión de autores de instituciones de distintos países a ambos lados del Atlántico, desde universidades, centros de investigación, museos y conservatorios, hasta el Ballet Nacional de España y artistas e investigadores independientes. Este hecho ha posibilitado también una mirada a la imagen de la danza a través de las artes plásticas, la fotografía, el cine o la literatura, así como la revisión de algunas figuras claves de la escena como Fanny Elssler o Antonia Mercé, que en este caso marcan los límites cronológicos del estudio.

El milagro de anaquillé (1927), a ballet project with libretto by Alejo Carpentier and music by Amadeo Roldán, originated at the intersection of avant-garde art, afrocubanismo, and ethnography. Inspired by the aesthetic experimentation of Les Ballets Russes and Les Ballets Suédois in Europe, Carpentier and Roldán adopted ballet as a vehicle for introducing avant-garde trends in Cuba. Their work referenced two revolutionary ballets: Rite of Spring and, more importantly, Parade. Seeking to restage an Abakuá ritual, their project illustrated the artistic output of afrocubanismo as well as the movement's ethnographic approach to the study of black culture. The libretto, which depicted a conflict between a US filmmaker and a group of Abakuá celebrants, critiqued the colonialist caricatures of the racial other's dancing body in cinema and ballet. In doing so, it contributed to the concurrent repudiation of colonialist films in Latin American intellectual circles. Amid pivotal changes in cultural anthropology, the libretto also alluded to the ideological entanglement of anthropology and coloniality. It obliquely represented the lopsided interactions-mediated by class, race, and education-between ethnographers and subjects. In formulating such political messages, Milagro made adept use of caricature, irony, metatheatricality, nonrealist representation, and other techniques from the avant-garde tool kit for critical interrogation of reality.