Alicia: icon and benchmark

Alicia Alonso’s extraordinary creative exercise strengthened one of the most solid icons of the Cuban culture and a powerful symbol of the entire nation.

Although it is not official (and perhaps it should be made official), Alicia is the national artist. Although she never needed appointments. Her art was (still is) her badge.

And that work materialized in a wonderful heritage. She was immortalized in school, company, authentic artistic movement that went even beyond ballet.

Together with the brothers Fernando and Alberto Alonso, Alicia is present at the dawn of the great Cuban stage dance, understood as an aesthetic realization of a people, as a highly inspired and worked expression of an identity.

And she was, without a doubt, at the top of that collective impulse.

It is no coincidence that Alicia Alonso has been the inspiration for so many great writers, musicians, painters, filmmakers, Cuban thinkers and elsewhere in the world. She managed to capture the shared spirit of an art of centuries and established it in this panorama.

What had appeared to some as elitist, she showed it could be popular... without betraying its essences, without lowering its true value.

One of the most beautiful images of the triumphant Revolution, which must also be understood as a cultural Revolution, was Alicia and her ballet performing in factories and bateyes.

It became the viability of a utopia: art for everyone. And she showed, like so many great creators, that sensitivity for art is everywhere.

And that same dancer, on the world's best stages, discovered novel meanings in steps and dynamics repeated a thousand times.

Her Giselle, for example, was not mere functional performance. It was more than technique, histrionic projection, or even style (and we are talking about an accomplished stylist).

Her Giselle was a truth, a hope. It was, is, the certainty of the triumph (albeit momentary, circumstantial) of beauty.

Alicia opted for beauty, in the most comprehensive and revolutionary sense of it.

In times when great dancers adopted Russian surnames, she highlighted her proud Latin identity, the strength of her roots, culture... which has always been a beating mortar, a crossroads for real or dreamed journeys, feet on the ground and mind in the air.

No one should be surprised that the day of her birth, December 21, has been marked as Ibero-American Dance Day. She is a leading figure of that art in this family of peoples. And from her homeland, she materialized a legacy that belongs to the world.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff