Revolutionary Moves

Tall trees have overtaken Calzada Street, in this city’s Vedado district. Their roots have buckled the sidewalks, and more tropical greenery envelops the dilapidated fronts of mansion after mansion. Once-immaculate white stucco is cracked and stained, elaborately carved stone balconies crumble at the edges, and curling ironwork fences are rusty and bent. Before the Cuban Revolution, this was a fashionable and privileged neighborhood, Havana’s Beverly Hills. Now the balconies are draped with laundry, as people make do in palatial homes that no one has the resources to maintain.

Just off the corner of Calzada and E streets, a small white sign in front of a turn-of-the-century convent quietly announces one of the revolution’s showcase accomplishments: the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, founded by legendary ballerina Alicia Alonso and renowned for its Made in Cuba passion and pride.

A tall arched entryway leads through a dark hallway and into a sunlit interior courtyard, where grass springs between cracked pavers and dancers lounge on rusty wrought iron, talking and smoking. Off the courtyard, sunlight streams through open wood-slatted French doors into a soaringly high-ceilinged studio, revealing every crevice in the plaster walls. As the company’s men sail through jetes in morning class, the floor vibrates alarmingly. A shaggy dog trots blithely out of a corner door and past them. In an upstairs studio, the women’s bodiesecho the building’s elegant lines--the graceful tilt of their heads, the long flow of their legs and precisely arched feet--though their vitality is sharply at odds with the surrounding air of shabby, makeshift practicality.

Inside a pair of shuttered doors, just past the entryway, is the company office, presided over by a vigilant secretary who guards yet another set of doors leading to the inner sanctum--Alonso’s office.

A Cuban cultural icon, Alonso, 77, rules her company as she once ruled the stage--imperiously. Nearly sightless even in her prime 40 or 50 years ago, she receives visitors from behind a massive wooden desk, her head wrapped in a brilliant red scarf, her dark eyes dramatically lined in black and her lips in scarlet. For some 40 minutes she sits nearly immobile, her few gestures studied and theatrical, poses carefully struck within a small space around her. Her words, too, are studied.

“The life of an artist is not to be in a closed room,” she says dramatically, without irony, in her heavily accented English, “it is to give your art all over the world.”

In fact, outside the bubble of charisma and control in Alonso’s office, the 120-member company she has built is preparing to do just that. The dancers are rehearsing “Giselle” for a December run in Havana, while the casting lists have been posted and the scenery shipped for a U.S. tour of the company’s new “Cinderella,” choreographed in 1996 by Pedro Consuegra, which opens Jan. 20 in Costa Mesa. It is the Cubans’ first appearance in the United States since 1979.

And the company’s momentum echoes outside the convent walls. Change is rocking Havana. Now 71, Castro cannot guarantee that the social and political edifice he has built will outlast him, and no one can say what shape it will take after him. Alonso’s company, a godchild of the revolution--state supported and sponsored--will have to change as well.

But in her quiet office and behind her desk, Alonso avoids the subject.

“Ah, ah, ah,” she says with an admonishing wag of a finger. “I cannot talk about politics. I can talk about art.”

She is determinedly, ingenuously, optimistic. “The future of this company is like the horizon. It is always in front of us. How can we say what will be there?”

And while she won’t discuss what will happen next, she is proud of what has gone before.

“Why did I start a company in Cuba?” she asks rhetorically. “Because I thought it was very important to bring culture to the people. The arts are essential to human beings, and dance is an art that expresses everything. Cuba deserved a company, it deserved a school. And I was right! Today we have one of the best companies in the world, and one of the best schools in the world, and a tremendous amount of talent. So that proves I was right!”

In the upstairs studio, Josefina Mendez--recently retired as one of the National Ballet’s “Four Jewels,” its four leading ballerinas after Alonso--eyes the corps with an intensity bred by 43 years of performing. “Pssst! Pssst! Gypsy!” she says, employing the incongruous (to American ears) Cuban hiss for attention. “Lift your leg!”

“Float, float!” she calls, as the dancers bourree out in the ghostly Wilis’ entrance in “Giselle.” “Make the fifth beautiful! Softly! Smoothly! Look at each other!”

The dancers stretch in visible effort, surging with group energy. As Mendez tells them their motivation for hurling an unfortunate character to oblivion, she goes into a kind of sing-song exhortation, softly tossing her head and hands in rhythm with her words.

“You have to feel that you are pushing him inside. It is not just a movement. We have already had one victim in the night, now you need another. We are dancing--more, more--now we are dying a little bit, now we burn. Feel what you dance.” It is almost a performance in itself.

“You have to feel more inside here,” says Laura Hormigon, 20, a principal dancer who came to the company from Spain three years ago. “You have to relate to other people more.”

If sensuality and intense emotion are cliche elements of Cuban character, they are authentic hallmarks of the National Ballet. Although Cuban ballet has a strong Russian influence--emphasizing full, expressive use of the upper body--that does not entirely explain the lushness of the company’s dancing.

Alonso is eloquent on the source of her company’s style. “Cubans enjoy life,” she says. “We are sad sometimes, but it’s for a very short time”--she snaps her fingers. “Cubans are very expressive. They have a wonderful ear for music, a tremendous sense of rhythm and plasticity. That is in the expression of the company, in the way we look at dancing itself.

“In the arts you are influenced by everything around you. You are like a sponge, you take from everything. Cuban gesture is different, and so the Cuban school has its own personality.”

That personality is on view in the studio, as Viengsay Valdes, 21, one of several young ballerinas who will dance Cinderella in the U.S., rehearses for her debut as Giselle, tilting into a perfect 180-degree arabesque penche and bending her head to her partner, Osmay Molina. Her movements are both tender and raw, as if she caressed not just Molina, but the air around her.

As for the company’s men, to see them attack a Spanish dance sequence is to believe that ballet is a masculine art. Two from their ranks now dance primarily in the States, officially on leave from the company and Cuba--Jose Manuel Carren~o, a principal at American Ballet Theatre, and Carlos Acosta, principal at the Houston Ballet--earning almost lascivious descriptions of their “definite sexuality” and “raw male presence.”

“This comes from the way we are,” Mendez says, taking a break in the courtyard. “We Cubans dance not only with our hips, but with our waist. It gives us a sensual quality even when we are dancing classics.”

She stands to demonstrate. “For instance, when I danced Odette [in “Swan Lake”], I danced it like this”--she undulates her torso in a sculptural figure eight that flows beautifully through her spine. “But we do this because we feel it. It’s in our folklore, our popular dances, it’s an influence you can’t take out. That’s why our boys have this bravura, this fire inside.”

One of those “boys,” Carlos Acosta, whose fire and virtuosity have been compared to Nureyev, agrees, and amplifies the point. “What the Cuban people have is a lot of love and passion for what they do. They appreciate what it takes to become a dancer; they appreciate life in general. They know the price they had to pay for these things. When you really work hard and know that might be the only thing you have, you are afraid to lose it.”

Cubans may be born to dance, they may even be born to dance ballet, but without Alicia Alonso, Odette would never have swayed like a Santeria goddess, and no one would be comparing Acosta to Nureyev.

Cuban ballet has been virtually Alonso’s solo creation, a product of her extraordinary zeal and ambition. She is one of the most lauded and controversial figures in the world of dance.

Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad del Cobre Martinez y del Hoyo began studying ballet (against the wishes of her father, an army veterinarian) in the same building that is now home to her company. It was then Cuba’s first ballet school, established by a group of wealthy arts patrons. Among her classmates was her future first husband, Fernando Alonso, son of one of the patrons.

When Fernando was sent to Florida, Alicia quit school, at 15, and followed him. At 16, she had a daughter with him, and all three went to New York, where she joined the fledgling American Ballet Theatre. She was beginning to attract attention when, in 1941, at 19, she began to have problems with her vision and was diagnosed with detached retinas (later, she also had cataracts). She underwent several operations that forced her to spend a year in bed, eyes bandaged, where she would practice footwork on her back.

She came back to make a star-is-born debut as Giselle, replacing an ill Alicia Markova. It became her most famous role and in the 1940s and ‘50s, she was acclaimed for her brilliant footwork, her emotional power, her unshakable balance and her voluptuous grace. Contemporary critic Walter Terry called her “a vision of enduring dance beauty.” In one of her last full-length performances in this country, in 1977, when she was in her late 50s, she could still bring a sold-out Metropolitan Opera House to its feet.

Not surprisingly, the determination that enabled her to overcome a seemingly insurmountable disability also earned her the nicknameBlack Cobra, according to choreographer Agnes de Mille. Donald Saddler, a fellow dancer at ABT who became a Broadway choreographer, says Alonso “attacked everything with passion and fire. She had that dedication that goes beyond words.”

He remembers one day in class when Antony Tudor, famous for reducing dancers to emotional shards, had Alonso in his sights. “She put her hands on her hips, and she said, ‘Mr. Tudor, you can’t ever make me cry,’ ” Saddler says. “He never picked on her again.”

Alonso returned to Cuba as a performer as early as the ‘40s, and with Fernando founded the National Ballet in 1948 (it celebrates its 50th anniversary in October). At first, it was made up mostly of visiting American dancers and was supported by Alonso’s earnings as a guest at ABT and other companies. But after Castro took over in 1959, the company became a state institution.

“Fidel, our president, was very conscious about culture,” she says. His picture, with her and her dancers by his side, and a portrait of Che Guevara adorn the walls of her outer office. “So I sent a budget for a school and a company to the government, to Fidel, and he accepted it, and that’s it. We have a theater, we have a school, and everything is subsidized.”

Students selected for the Alicia Alonso National Ballet School study for free. “We audition every year all over the island,” Alonso says proudly. “We are always searching for talent. That’s why we have developed so fast.”

In the early years, Alonso took her company on truck tours all over Cuba.

“We’ve been working 50 years to educate our people in ballet,” she says. “Now from one end of the island to the other they know about ballet. This is also because I myself have danced in every corner of the island.”

In the mid-’70s, Alicia and Fernando were divorced (he started another company in Camaguey), and she married Pedro Simon, a dance writer and editor. By then, the National Ballet was well-established as one of Cuba’s proudest cultural achievements, and it regularly toured Europe and the Eastern bloc with Alonso alone at its head.

In fact, Alonso became virtually synonymous with the company she founded. She danced full-length classical parts into her 70s, even her daughter and her grandson have danced in the company. She still performs in a limited fashion; at the ABT gala in May, she did an excerpt, sitting and gesturing, from “Le Spectre de la Rose.” Casting and repertory decisions remain in her hands at the National Ballet, and she even conducts some rehearsals, albeit with an assistant.

Asked which she considers her greatest achievement, her career or her company, Alonso answers without hesitation.

“They are a perfect balance,” she says. “In the first part, I develop as an artist, getting strong inside as a person, develop my knowledge. Then when I got a name, I could share all that I knew and develop the company like a frame for all my work and all my art. This is the second part of a life. Otherwise, it’s terrible. It is like a writer who has many ideas--but never writes!”

She claps her hands in emphasis and asks, “Do you see what I mean?”

At the moment, the former convent looks a bit more like a school for young women than a major professional company. The next generation at the National Ballet is also the current generation--most of the principal ballerinas, dancers like Hormigon, Valdes and and another Cinderella coming to Costa Mesa, Lorna Feijoo--are barely into their 20’s. Some of the men are so young they still have adolescent acne; practicing a scene from “Don Quixote,” four of them hide snickers and roll their eyes at their martinet of a rehearsal mistress, like boys laughing behind the teacher’s back.

The girls seem mostly reserved and demure, hesitant about saying anything strongly.

“Well, it’s a big responsibility,” ventures Valdes, talking about her imminent debut as Giselle, Alonso’s most famous role. “It is a challenge, because it’s something the greatest ballerinas have done.”

This is something Valdes knows only secondhand, because, she says, her huge dark eyes unblinking, she has never seen another ballet company dance, except on videotape. Neither has Anissa Curbelo, also 21. They talk about the prospect of performing in the United States almost diffidently.

“Well, yes, I’d love it. Every dancer wants to dance in New York,” says Curbelo.

They don’t seem to be the kind of girls who would follow a boyfriend to Florida at the age of 15 or log mental practice hours from a hospital bed. But then, they have little opportunity to show what they are made of. The National Ballet was built around Alonso and a highly stratified casting system with her at the top. Now that she is no longer performing, there is something of a hole at the company’s center.

“There has been a generational break,” acknowledges Mendez, noting that she and the other “Jewels” (Loipa Araujo, Mirta Pla and Aurora Bosch), now in their 50s or older, have also retired. Over the past five years or so, other leading dancers that followed Mendez and her group, like Rosario Suarez (now living in Miami) and Amparo Brito, have left the company or Cuba; as have a number of talented dancers following them. “We have had to rush a little bit.”

In the 1970s, as the National Ballet garnered acclaim in its international debuts, much of the praise had to do with that distinctive Cuban movement style and how far the company had come in a short time. In 1979, New York Times dance critic Clive Barnes wrote: “One is simply amazed at the quality of the dancing. Why should a small country like this have produced so many excellent dancers?”

Although political tensions have kept the company from visiting the U.S. since 1979, it has increased its international touring in recent years, in part to earn needed hard currency.

Recently, reviews on those tours have been mixed. In Spain, which the National Ballet has visited regularly in the past five years, the new “Cinderella”--featuring Art Deco sets and lively choreography in classic 19th century style--was described as “enjoyable from beginning to end,” with Lorna Feijoo singled out as “a new gem.” But the company in general “is very up and down right now,” says Spanish critic Julio Brava, who writes for Madrid’s ABC, one of three national newspapers. “They haven’t replaced the great figures they had before. There are practically no stars.”

At least, not still at home. Now many of the most famous of Cuba’s dancers, apart from Alonso herself, are working in the U.S. In recent years, the Cuban government has had to allow many of its leading artists to spend much of their time off the island in order to keep them from defecting, and ballet is no exception. Consuegra, one of the company’s regular choreographers, lives in France. Although Alonso says emphatically that Acosta and Carren~o are still on the roster of the National Ballet, and though they return occasionally for guest performances, both have spent most of their careers outside Cuba. Carren~o, 29, left at 22, and Acosta, 24, at 18. Another, Lorena Feijoo (Lorna’s sister), a popular principal at the Joffrey Ballet, left the National Ballet in 1991.

“Alicia knows the best way to make a career is to go outside where people can see you,” says Acosta. ‘And they know they couldn’t keep someone like me or Carren~o in Cuba all the time.” Even Alonso reportedly spends much of her time in Spain these days.

It’s also a fact that the most famous Cuban dancers outside Cuba are men. In part this may simply be a matter of timing--who in the company was ripe as the doors of international attention and opportunity opened. But another former National Ballet dancer, Alonso’s one-time partner, Jorge Esquivel, sees a deeper reason.

“Nobody was ever allowed to do more than Alicia,” he says “She is perfect, no one can dance better than her. She wouldn’t let anyone dance a part like Giselle until they were almost 40, and not when they were young and needed the opportunity.”

Esquivel, now 47, and a teacher and character dancer at the San Francisco Ballet cites Amparo Brito, his ex-wife, as an example. “Amparo won the gold medal in Moscow in 1973 when she was 17 or 18, but Alicia would never give her a chance. It’s like she was putting her feet on [Amparo’s] head.”

“Now they’re developing the younger generation very quickly, but it’s out of necessity,” Brito says, looking over a balcony at Centro Pro-Danza, a school run by Alicia’s daughter Laura, where Brito now teaches. She speaks hesitantly, but intensely. “It wasn’t always like that. It wasn’t like that for me.”

Rumors about changes in power are always rife in Cuba, and murmurs are beginning about a struggle for future leadership at the National Ballet. Alonso may be a National Hero of Labor and a state figure--the duty-free carts on Cubana airlines even sell Alicia Alonso perfume--but there are some inside Cuba willing to say that it’s time for her second act to end.

“People are tired of this story already,” says a woman who teaches at the Cuban state theater school. “They don’t go to the theater to see the ballet anymore, they go to see if she will fall.”

Outside of Cuba, there are those who are willing to go further.

“I think the golden hour of the National Ballet has passed, that it is in crisis now,” says Esquivel. “It is like the Revolution. It is like an orange, when you cut it in half, one side is Fidel and politics, the other is Alicia and the arts. She is good and bad. And Fidel too has a positive and a negative side. He cares about the people, but he cares about himself much more. The people are looking for more liberty, but they don’t have the right to their dreams--and that is very difficult whether it’s political or artistic.”

Right now, however, neither of these elemental Cuban forces is giving an inch. In fact, one of Alonso’s most famous qualities as a dancer was her almost magical ability to stay on pointe, in time- and heart-stopping balance. Her partners would occasionally have to nudge her out of her pose, or risk falling behind the music for the rest of the dance.

Maria Karnilova, a close friend of Alonso’s since they danced and roomed together at ABT, remembers the same quality, but for a different reason.

“She wouldn’t get off the stage--ever. I think she always wanted to prove that she was wonderful, and she has spent her whole life doing that,” Karnilova said from New York. “She gave up everything to dancing, even her family. She had the kind of passion where she couldn’t let go.”

For her part, Alonso tackles criticism with typical hauteur. There are no real stars in the company? She coyly won’t name names, but she implies that it’s just a matter of time. “Dancers,” she says, “[must] create themselves.”

As for the need for forward motion, she won’t be specific but, in the short term she boasts of new choreographic talent, from around the world, perhaps even the U.S., that the National Ballet will sponsor next year. For her there are no clouds on the company’s limitless horizon.

“My mother is brilliant, but she cannot see. So she sees things as she imagines them,” says her daughter Laura Alonso. “As she wants them to be.”

But perhaps even the indomitable Alicia Alonso realizes that she can’t stay on pointe forever.

“Life,” she concedes, “doesn’t stay in one spot. Life is a continuum.”

*

* National Ballet of Cuba, “Cinderella,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Jan. 20-25, Tues-Sat, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m. $10-$60. (714) 556-2787.