Dancing with the Revolution

Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba

Elizabeth B. Schwall

• Editore: The University of North Carolina Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469662985
• Argomento: Historia
• Categoria: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

Elizabeth B. Schwall aligns culture and politics by focusing on an art form that became a darling of the Cuban revolution: dance. In this history of staged performance in ballet, modern dance, and folkloric dance, Schwall analyzes how and why dance artists interacted with republican and, later, revolutionary politics. Drawing on written and visual archives, including intriguing exchanges between dancers and bureaucrats, Schwall argues that Cuban dancers used their bodies and ephemeral, nonverbal choreography to support and critique political regimes and cultural biases. As esteemed artists, Cuban dancers exercised considerable power and influence. They often used their art to posit more radical notions of social justice than political leaders were able or willing to implement. After 1959, while generally promoting revolutionary projects like mass education and internationalist solidarity, they also took risks by challenging racial prejudice, gender norms, and censorship, all of which could affect dancers personally. On a broader level, Schwall shows that dance, too often overlooked in histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, provides fresh perspectives on what it means for people, and nations, to move through the world.

CHAPTER ONE

Valuing Ballet in the Cuban Republic

Look, I do more with my feet than you and all those men with your titles.

—Alicia Alonso, 1956

On January 8, 1949, thirty-five thousand Cubans packed into the Stadium Universitario in Havana for a free performance by Ballet Alicia Alonso, Cuba’s first professional ballet company.¹ This was nearly three times the capacity of the twelve-thousand-seat stadium, and ten thousand people had been turned away. Company cofounder Fernando Alonso bragged, “The audience was standing in the field, on the steps, on the chairs, on the roof, etc. It was in short the most impressive sight that Cuba has ever seen.”² From 1949 through 1955, Cuban ballet dancers reached mass audiences in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Camagüey, Pinar del Río, and even Miami.³ In Santiago de Cuba, one such performance changed a life. Jorge Lefebre, a mulato art student from a poor family, watched Ballet Alicia Alonso at the Antonio Maceo Stadium. The performance catalyzed a series of encounters and opportunities that launched his international ballet career.⁴ As these large performances and Lefebre’s personal trajectory show, ballet had achieved a relatively expansive and esteemed place in Cuban society, becoming entertainment, passion, and even vocation for many by the 1950s.

This chapter charts how and why Cubans came to value ballet from the 1930s through the 1950s. As for how, it started with civic associations and talented dancers like Lefebre promoting ballet as discussed in the first two sections. Appreciation eventually percolated up to the Cuban state as examined in the last section. This order of interest, from citizens to the government, evidences how ballet was the product of performer and audience activism and implicated in civil society from the moment of its inception in Cuba. As for why, ballet was an expression of whiteness and elite sensibilities. The form had roots in bourgeois culture and sociability in Cuba, which was sustained by an extensive associational culture and increasingly powerful white women of Cuban high society.⁵ Bolstered by these connotations, structures, and advocates, ballet secured a privileged position in Cuban national culture by the late 1950s. From such heights, ballet would thrive in subsequent decades, as later chapters will detail.

With these assertions, I offer a revisionist interpretation of Cuban ballet history in line with recent scholarship on Cuba’s republican period. Traditional narratives about ballet emphasize victimization by neglectful (at best) and tyrannical (at worst) governments before 1959, which contrasted sharply with enlightened, supportive revolutionary leaders.⁶ While perhaps well founded, such characterizations fail to recognize the considerable leverage that ballet dancers and supporters possessed by the late 1950s. In fact, this period encompassed key ballet developments as dancers and supporters honed artistic visions, advertised ballet’s social significance, and cultivated networks that bolstered its cultural and political capital in Cuba. Examining the period known as the republic “on its own terms,” I join recent scholarship on the first half of the twentieth century, especially by historians Irina Pacheco Valera, Jorgelina Guzmán Moré, and Cary García Yero, who have shown that cultural institutions and policies developed over these decades laid the institutional foundations for what followed.⁷ Equally, I apply dance scholar Susan Foster’s theorization about “valuing dance” and offer a case study for how dancers, students, audiences, and eventually governments in republican Cuba came to esteem ballet as a resource for personal and national development.⁸ With a revisionist eye, sold-out performances that enamored ballet converts like Lefebre backed up Alicia’s claim in the epigraph that her supple feet, not to mention those of her students and colleagues, did so much.⁹ Notably, they brought a dynamic Cuban ballet tradition into being before 1959.

Making a Cuban Ballet “Dynasty”

The official Cuban ballet historian Miguel Cabrera first saw Alicia Alonso on television. Cabrera later recalled the magical moment when “Alicia appeared on the screen as though she were a fairy.”¹⁰ Esteem and even love harbored by Cabrera and others contributed importantly to creating what became an Alonso ballet “dynasty,” as one article in the main Havana weekly Bohemia called it.¹¹ The distinguished family included the triad of Alicia the ballerina, Fernando (Alicia’s husband) the pedagogue, and Alberto (Fernando’s brother) the choreographer. Making the Alonso ballet “dynasty” involved talent and hard work, crossing borders, and competitive energies, as well as meaningful partnerships between professionals and adoring audience members like Cabrera.

The dynasty began with well-off families that included a musical matriarch, Laura Rayneri de Alonso. In 1934, she became president of Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical (Pro-Art Musical Society), which had been founded in 1918 by white, bourgeois women, who believed that high culture could “enlighten and educate” Cuban audiences. Although originally focused on music, starting in the 1930s the women of Pro-Arte supported dance, bringing notable performers of modern dance, Spanish dance, and ballet to Cuba.¹² Additionally, Pro-Arte organized the country’s first ballet classes in 1931. Ballet, declamation, and guitar classes for youth cost a modest additional amount a month for members (half of a peso in 1946, for instance).¹³ Russian émigré Nicolai Yavorsky, who resided in Havana at the time, taught the first ballet classes. His students included the sisters Blanca (Cuca) and Alicia Martínez, who had an army veterinarian father and a mother who was a “well-educated seamstress with ambition.”¹⁴ They lived in a large apartment in the privileged Vedado neighborhood in Havana and matriculated in Yavorsky’s classes in the summer of 1931. The brothers Fernando and Alberto Alonso were also among the early students. Living in a house in Vedado, their distinguished family included a father, who was an accountant for a U.S. trading company, and a mother, Laura Rayneri de Alonso, who was a pianist, member of Pro-Arte, and president of the organization from 1934 to 1948. In 1932, Alberto enrolled in ballet classes, and his older brother Fernando followed three years later.¹⁵ The Martínez and Alonso families provide insight into the backgrounds of the first generation of Pro-Arte students.

Ballet likely appealed to Havana’s prominent families because it reportedly built character and physical health, thereby fostering a robust nation. Pro-Arte publications claimed that teachers combatted dilettantism and developed students with “a serious spirit of the artistic profession, … a sense of collective responsibility, and a consciousness of moral commitment.”¹⁶ The high society magazine Social emphasized ballet’s health benefits in a series on female fitness. One article featured Yavorsky contending that ballet “is one of the most complete and ennobling exercises known to educate the body.” The article concluded that the edifying activity resulted in “bodily perfection.”¹⁷ In a student performance program, an essay eulogized ballet for cultivating “mental concentration, and a force of memory that are not common in other forms of physical exercise.” Such personal benefits in turn improved the national body politic: “The present interest in the study of ballet in our country is a very encouraging sign for the future, because it contributes to improving the physical health and artistic education of our youth and of generations to come.”¹⁸ This resonated with an idea long promoted by Pro-Arte that cultural activity “renders great service to the homeland [patria].”¹⁹ Promoters, then, imbued cultural activities like ballet with great consequence as a means for personal and national betterment.

Ballet also contributed to national reputations when Cuban dancers earned accolades abroad. Through their achievements, ballet went from an admirable pastime to a serious profession. From 1935 to 1941, Alberto Alonso danced with the Europe-based Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo directed by Yavorsky’s old friend, Colonel de Basil. Then, from 1944 to 1945, he performed in Hollywood and with the company Ballet Theatre (today American Ballet Theatre) of New York. In 1941, Alberto returned to Cuba and became the director of Pro-Arte’s ballet school, a position that he held on and off until 1960.²⁰ Meanwhile, Fernando and Alicia Alonso traveled to New York in 1937, married, and had their daughter Laura. They trained with premier “Old World” teachers residing in New York and performed in Broadway musicals and with ballet companies, including Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan (a predecessor of the New York City Ballet) and Ballet Theatre.²¹

Alicia Alonso in particular epitomized Cuban balletic potential as she became an internationally renowned ballerina. In her first year with Ballet Theatre, she performed leading roles to critical acclaim. In 1940, dance critic John Martin opined, “She showed herself to be a promising young artist with an easy technique, a fine sense of line and a great deal of youthful charm.”²² At the end of the performance season, Martin flagged her as one of several artists “of less than stellar rank who belong among [the] season’s assets.”²³ In November 1943, she performed the title role of the ballet Giselle. Originally staged in nineteenth-century France, it tells the story of a young peasant girl who falls in love with a prince disguised as a villager. When class differences keep them apart, Giselle dies of a broken heart. Martin found that “Miss Alonso acquitted herself with brilliance,” and her technical foundations were “so strong that perfection seem[ed] only a matter of time.”²⁴ Already in 1945, Martin saw improvement, predicting that the “extraordinarily brilliant young ballerina from Cuba will one day be one of the great Giselles.”²⁵ Alicia had mastered a classic in ballet repertories, indicating her arrival in the upper echelons of the art. Her fame reached beyond the ballet world, as she appeared in the magazines Life, Norte, and Newsweek in 1944, and the magazine Mademoiselle chose her as one of the ten most outstanding women of 1946.²⁶

Alicia’s ballet achievements profited Cuba, according to admiring compatriots who decided to organize a tribute for her. Led by arts critic José Manuel Valdés Rodríguez, the Comité Organizador del Homenaje Nacional a Alicia Alonso (Organizing Committee for the National Homage to Alicia Alonso) included Laura Rayneri de Alonso and Paulina Alsina de Grau (the widow of Cuban president Ramón Grau’s late brother), among other notables. Given “the exceptional merits of Alicia Alonso, recognized unanimo...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Valuing Ballet in the Cuban Republic
• Chapter Two: Performing Race and Nation before 1959
• Chapter Three: Dance Institutionalization after 1959
• Chapter Four: Choreographing New Men and Women
• Chapter Five: Dancing Public
• Chapter Six: Dance Internationalism
• Chapter Seven: Opening Dance
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List