Career

Alonso’s debut was in Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty at the Teatro Auditorium in 1932. After getting married, having her daughter, and undergoing several operations – the last taking place in Havana – Alonso returned to New York in 1943 and was asked to replace the Ballet Theatre’s prima ballerina Alicia Markova in Giselle. Critics quickly noticed her prowess on stage. Barbara Steinberg wrote, “Her vision difficulties helped inspire her interpretation of the role” in Dance Magazine. She was promoted to principal dancer of the company in 1946 and performed her role in Giselle until 1948.

Watch Alonso perform Giselle and Swan Lake!

    Alonso also performed in Swan Lake, Antony Tudor’s Undertow, Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, and in world premieres such as de Mille’s Fall River Legend. Alonso had developed a reputation as an intensely dramatic dancer, an ultra-pure skilled technician, and an extremely skilled interpreter of classical and romantic repertoires. Her partners and members of the theatre helped her hide her disability by being trained to stand exactly where she needed them to, using colored spotlights to guide her across the stage. Alonso also worked with the Ballet Russe until 1959, embarking on a ten-week tour of the Soviet Union, performing in pieces such as Giselle and Path of Thunder. She is credited with being the first dancer from the West to perform in the Soviet Union and the first American representative to dance with the Bolshoi and Kirov Theatres in Moscow and Leningrad. Alonso would go on to dance through Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, and North and South America and dance as a guest star with the Opera de Paris, the Royal Danish Ballet, and other companies. In 1948, Alicia Alonso returned to Havana to help develop ballet in Cuba.

A Book on Alicia Alonso and 
the Ballet Nacional de Cuba
Photo Credits: Walter Terry

Sponsored largely through her fame and earnings, she opened the Alicia Alonso Ballet Company, which eventually became known as the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. With the success of the company, Alonso strove to showcase more Cuban dancers than non-Cuban dancers, but in her sixties, she began to limit the careers of dancers she feared would pose a competition to her fame and popularity, causing some dancers to leave altogether. Many voiced that Alonso ruled the company with an iron fist, with some even comparing her to Fidel Castro. Although difficult, Alonso has given a spotlight to many dancers who dance or have danced with the American Ballet Theatre, the Boston Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, the Washington Ballet, and the Royal Ballet. Alonso retired in her mid-70s in 1995 due to health issues (Merrigan 225). After an extended run in the spotlight, Alicia Alonso died on October 17, 2019, in Havana, Cuba from health complications when she was ninety-eight years old. She is remembered by Barbara Steinberg in Dance Magazine as “dramatic, passionate, and elegiac.”