Eva Evdokimova (Western Germany), Atilio Labis
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i THE CUBAN BALLET: ITS RATIONALE, AESTHETICS AND ARTISTIC IDENTITY AS FORMULATED BY ALICIA ALONSO A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Lester Tomé January, 2011 Examining Committee Members: Joellen Meglin, Advisory Chair, Dance Karen Bond, Dance Michael Klein, Music Theory Heather Levi, External Member, Anthropology ii © Copyright 2011 by Lester Tomé All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT In the 1940s, Alicia Alonso became the first Latin American dancer to achieve international prominence in the field of ballet, until then dominated by Europeans. Promoted by Alonso, ballet took firm roots in Cuba in the following decades, particularly after the Cuban Revolution (1959). This dissertation integrates the methods of historical research, postcolonial critique and discourse analysis to explore the performative and discursive strategies through which Alonso defined her artistic identity and the collective identity of the Cuban ballet. The present study also examines the historical context of the development of ballet in Cuba, Alonso’s rationale for the practice of ballet on the Island, and the relationship between the Cuban ballet and the European ballet. Alonso defended the legitimacy of Cuban dancers to practice ballet and, in specific, perform European classics such as Giselle and Swan Lake. She opposed the notion that ballet was the exclusive patrimony of Europeans. She also insisted that the cultivation of this dance form on the Island was not an act of cultural colonialism. In her view, the development of ballet in Cuba consisted, instead, of 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. The cosmopolitanism of Cuban artists was evident in their openness to assimilate foreign artistic languages. Simultaneously, nationalist attitudes within the local artistic community sanctioned such assimilation only if it iv resulted in artworks that expressed a Cuban ethos. Thus, in formulating the artistic identity of the Cuban ballet, Alonso cast Cuban dancers as both heirs of the European nineteenth-century classics and proponents of a distinctive national aesthetics defined by the accents that they brought to the performance of this repertory and that, in Alonso’s opinion, were expressive of the Cuban culture. In her description of such aesthetics, 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 redrew the geopolitical 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. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Dr. Joellen Meglin, this dissertation’s advisory committee chair, for her insightful guidance through the process of choosing the topic, refining the research questions, analyzing the sources, and writing and editing the text. I have benefited from her generous feedback and high academic standards, which not only inform this dissertation but also serve as model of excellence that I try to emulate in my own work as a pedagogue. She has been a true mentor and an invaluable source of encouragement. I thank the other members of the committee, Dr. Karen Bond and Dr. Michael Klein, for their input, which enriched this project, as well for their support. Dr. Marion Kant, who took an interest in my work and invited me to contribute an article on Alicia Alonso to The Cambridge Companion to Ballet has been another valuable mentor to whom I am deeply grateful as well. I am very thankful for the fellowships and grants that Temple University and its Dance Department conferred upon me, which made the completion of this degree possible. Also, I am grateful for travel awards from the Society of Dance History Scholars, University of the Arts and Smith College that allowed me to present my ongoing research on Alonso in scholarly conferences. Dance historian Ahmed Piñeiro, from the magazine Cuba en el Ballet and the National Dance Museum, in Havana, answered my questions and helped me access sources that were geographically outside my reach. Dr. Mike Masci assisted me in the analysis of musical scores. I thank them too. vi Finally, I am grateful for the advice, inspiration, assurance and encouragement that came from relatives, friends, colleagues and students as I worked on this project. vii To my parents, Francisco and Zenia, who instilled in me a love for studying, and to my brother, Julio, who introduced me to the performing arts. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v DEDICATION.................................................................................................................. vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................1 2. NATIONALIST VOICES AND EUROPEAN CONNECTIONS: ALICIA ALONSO AND THE CUBAN BALLET IN CONTEXT ................30 Nationalism in the Early Decades of the Cuban Republic ........................31 The Search for a Cuban Identity in the Arts .............................................46 The Pro-Arte Musical Society: Imported or Home-Made Ballet? ............67 The United States: From “Ballets Americains” to American Ballet .........80 The Cuban Revolution’s Policies on National Culture and the Arts ......100 3. IN DEFENSE OF THE CUBAN BALLET: ALONSO’S RATIONALE FOR THE PRACTICE OF BALLET IN CUBA ..........................................119 Approaching Ballet as an International Art Fom ....................................128 Cuba’s Spanish Heritage: A Conduit to European Culture ....................135 Taking Ballet Across Cultures, Races and Social Classes ......................151 Cubanizing Ballet, Provincializing Europe .............................................167 4. ALONSO’S PERFORMANCE AND NARRATIVE OF HER CLASSICIST IDENTITY ....................................................................181 Career-shaping Decisions in Pursuit of the Classics................................184 Self-portrait: Custodian of the Romantic and Classical Styles................218 Ballet Genealogies: Continuous Tradition or Fractured History? ..........227 Referencing Ballet’s History in Performances and Political Maps .........247 Tribute Galas: The Staging of a Historical Persona ................................256 5. MUSICALITY, SIGNIFIER OF A CUBAN AESTHETICS IN BALLET ..................................................................................................269 ix Ballet Aesthetics and the Tropes of a Cuban Identity .............................275 Features of a Cuban Musicality: Phrasing, Melody and Tempo .............283 A Cuban Musicality Imagined or Acquired? ..........................................297 Music in the Blood: Imagining a Cuban Musicality ...............................302 Dissonant Notes: a Counter-narrative, a Genealogy, a Pedagogy ..........313 CONCLUSIONS .............................................................................................................329 REFERENCES CITED ...................................................................................................339 APPENDIX: ALICIA ALONSO’S REPERTORY ........................................................364 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION New York, November 2, 1943: Hailing from Cuba, Alicia Alonso debuted in the title role of Giselle in a performance of Ballet Theatre, replacing the British star Alicia Markova, who was sick. At the time, a Cuban ballet dancer was a rarity, even more so if she starred in a work considered the epitome of European Romantic ballet. Though Cuban dances were immensely popular in the United States in the 1940s, the Island was by no means associated with ballet. Since the early 1920s, Hollywood, Broadway and the US record industry had familiarized Americans with images of Cuba as an exotic destination: a land that lured the visitor with beaches, casinos and endless nights of romance and inebriation, and where life unfolded to hot rumba and conga rhythms. That evening, while Alonso performed in the Metropolitan Opera House, it is likely that a few blocks away Xavier Cugat and his Orchestra played Cuban music at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Hits such as “The Peanut Vendor” and “Always in My Heart,” arrangements in English of Cuban songs, surely played in radios and gramophones in countless American homes. Patrons in dance halls across the country, from New York to Los Angeles, probably swayed their hips to Cuban rhythms. Cuba is still known as the country that created and exported habanera, bolero, son, conga, rumba, mambo and cha-cha-chá. Today, however,