THE CUBAN BALLET: ITS RATIONALE, AESTHETICS AND ARTISTIC IDENTITY AS FORMULATED BY ALICIA ALONSO

Abstract

In the 1940s, Alicia Alonso became the first Latin American dancer to achieve prominence in the field of ballet, until then dominated by Europeans. Promoted by Alonso, ballet took firm roots in Cuba, particularly after the Cuban Revolution (1959). This dissertation integrates historical research, postcolonial critique and discourse analysis to explore the performative and discursive strategies through which Alonso defined the identity of the Cuban ballet. The study examines the historical context of the development of ballet in Cuba, Alonso's rationale for the practice of this dance form on the Island, and the relationship between the Cuban ballet and the European ballet. Alonso insisted that the cultivation of ballet in her country was not an act of cultural colonialism. For her, the development of the Cuban ballet amounted to an exploration of a distinctive Cuban voice within this dance form, a reformulation of a European legacy from a postcolonial perspective. Her rationale for the practice of ballet in Cuba captured the tension between cosmopolitan and nationalist forces that defined the country's artistic production throughout the twentieth century. Alonso defended the legitimacy of the Cuban dancers' performances of European classics such as Giselle and Swan Lake. She cast Cuban dancers as both heirs of the European nineteenth-century classics, but also proponents of a distinctive national aesthetics defined by the accents that they brought to the performance of this repertory and that, in her opinion, were expressive of the Cuban culture. Alonso proposed that, among other elements, a special sense of musicality distinguished Cuban dancers: she recycled the image of Cubans as a musical people, a trope that commonly informs representations of Cubans and their culture. The phenomenon of Alonso and the Cuban ballet helped to redraw the international boundaries of this dance form, disassociating the notion of ownership of ballet's legacy from its geographic and cultural origins in Europe. In today's dance world, increasingly marked by the international flow of dance genres, the study of Alonso's promotion of ballet in Cuba sheds light on the practices and discourses through which dancers assimilate and take ownership of foreign traditions.