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Maestro Fernando Alonso:
Benois de la Dance Award Laureate
by Damián Donéstevez

Cuba’s 2000 National Dance Prize winner, Maestro Fernando Alonso has been granted the Benois de la Dance Award in the category of Life in Art, in recognition for his long artistic career as a ballet professor, dancer and choreographer. The announcement was made at the Bolshoi Theater’s new stage in Moscow.

The jury granted Alonso the award –considered the Oscar in the world of dance— for the historic importance of his foundational work at the Cuban National Ballet Company, the Ballet and National Arts School, its role as the director of the Camagüey Ballet and more than 50 years as a teacher in various countries.

The prize is named after renowned world theater figure, Alexander Benois, who introduced a conception of new musical theater, which unites new music, choreography and stage art.

When Fernando Alonso started ballet at the Pro-Arte Musical Society in Havana in the 1930’s, he didn’t think that he would create a unique Cuban ballet style in the future. In an exclusive interview for Radio Havana Cuba, reporter Damián Donéstevez spoke with Alonso at the headquarters of the Cuban National Ballet School about the Benois Award and other important issues:

- We are speaking with Maestro, Fernando Alonso, the founder of the Cuban National Ballet School. He has recently won the Benois Prize in Moscow. How do you feel about it?

Oh! I feel very thrilled, because after all it’s a very important international prize. I was thinking so much that I have this prize for my achievements, my achievements are all these wonderful people surrounding me and I owe them the prize, if it wasn’t for them, I would have not won the prize: the students, the wonderful teachers, the wonderful dancers who are dancing in the company, overseas and in Cuba, and there is a great deal of talent.

- What do you think the Cuban National Ballet School has to offer to the world right now?

It’s offering the way that Cubans dance, the way the girls and the boys of the Cuban world dance, and it’s very important because they can really feel the Cuban soil and the Cuban art in their blood and I enjoy that so much.

- Going back a little bit to the beginnings, what do you think you have created and what are the influences of the Cuban National Ballet School, because you’ve created a Cuban style, but you’ve had influences.

Everybody thinks that I have created a Cuban style, I have not created a Cuban style, I was trying to teach Cuban dancers to dance classical ballet real well, but it’s them that injected the Cuban style in it. If you are in a bus stop, you look at the girls trying to get it right and they are not standing still, they are really moving and singing, and this is Cuba, this is the Cuban way of dancing, that’s Cuban ballet.

The influences are the Negro descendants, the wonderful sense of rhythm, sense of “machismo”, and the same thing with the Spanish inheritance; who is a Spaniard that is not a dancer in Spain, ever since they are born they are dancers.

The Russians injected that tremendous force in the way they dance and the Cubans have injected this style that we have injected in ballet, and this is going abroad and having a wonderful success in all these beautiful audiences that surround the world, in England, in France. I couldn’t be happier.

- Are you happy with the work you’ve done, with what you’ve created?

I’m very excited about it, I am very happy with the results of that endeavor at the beginning of our careers and always thinking that we should bring ballet to Cuban dancers so that they didn’t have to go through all the difficulties that we did go through.

- Did you think at the beginning when you created this school that it was going to be like this?

When we started ballet, Pro-Arte Musical Society didn’t want to have professional dancers, they wanted to have all these girls take these ballet classes and know how to walk, how to behave, how to move, this enchanted movement that ballet gives to the ladies; but the point is that they were good and they wanted a little bit more than that, so they went over what Pro-Arte Musical was thinking and we began to shape it.

My brother first went to Cannes and started dancing with Les Ballet Ruses de Monte Carlo and then I left for New York and decided to do the same thing. What the hell, after all, he was enjoying himself, he was dancing, he was dancing with the girls and the company and meeting new people in the world and I said: ‘I want to do that too’, so I changed and I moved to New York. Then, I worked there as a stenographer, an x-ray technician, I did a hell of a lot of things to study ballet but in one year and a half I was dancing in one of the best companies in New York, so I couldn’t ask for better.

And later we decided that all these Cuban dancers had the right to really be able to dance in a company and dance ballet in a proper way and this is what we did, and now we have it.

Still very active and strong, 93 year- old maestro Fernando Alonso has earned prestige worldwide as one of the world’s best ballet professors and as the principal creator of the internationally known and praised Cuban ballet school. Alonso discovered, was the mentor of and formed Cuban prima ballerina and Director of the Cuban National Ballet Company, Alicia Alonso, to whom he was married for a number of years and with whom he has a daughter, ballet mistress and Director of the Havana based Pro-Dance Center, Laura Alonso.

In the Big Apple Fernando Alonso joined the American Ballet Caravan or antecedent of the New York City Ballet and in 1940 he became a member of the recently founded Ballet Theater of the same city. He was a soloist and stayed at the Ballet Theater until 1948, when, along with his wife Alicia and brother Alberto Alonso, he got involved in the historic event of setting up the Cuban National Ballet Company, whose general direction he assumed for 27 years.

The 1959 Cuban Revolution gave maestro Alonso endless possibilities of professional realization as the General Director of the Cuban National Ballet Company from 1959 to 1975, of the National Ballet School from 1962 to 1967 and of the Camagüey Ballet from 1975 to 1992, institutions to which he devoted himself with sustained and valuable creative work.

He is still very active and goes to the headquarters of the Cuban National Ballet School every day to supervise rehearsals and continue the work he started many years ago.