Alberto Julio Alonso Rayneri

Choreographer, dancer and master of Cuban ballet. One of the members of the founding triad of ballet in Cuba, and the par excellence choreographer of the Cuban school of ballet. Recognized as the first Cuban professional ballet dancer who traveled abroad.

Born in Havana in 1917, he was the son of Laura Rayneri, a woman of great cultural interests, a concert pianist who did not pursue her vocation due to the prejudices of the era, and she supported from an early age the artistic interests of her children Alberto and Fernando and had the audacity to support them from the executive positions she held in the Pro Arte Musical Society.

As a child he studied violin. He completed his primary education in a private Catholic school, and began his secondary education in Alabama, United States. In 1932 he interrupted his studies due to the economic crisis prevailing at the time, and returned to Havana. Originally interested in seeking physical training to maintain his fitness as a basketball, field and track, diving and American football player, he enrolled in ballet school in 1933, to become the first Cuban to study this artistic expression in Cuba.

Precisely, this institution had opened in 1931 a Ballet Academy, in which the Russian emigrant Nicolás Yavorski had been hired as a professor. Alberto enrolled there in 1933 and although the teaching had barely a decorative sense and the teacher showed more love for classical dance than deep mastery of it, in a very short time he revealed gifts as an interpreter, participating in productions such as The Blue Danube, Prince Igor and a very free version of Coppelia.

In 1935 he was hired by the Russian Ballet of Monte Carlo, during its passage through Havana and joined the company as a character dancer. For six years he remained in its ranks, where he was able, in contact with great performers of the genre, to make a more rigorous apprenticeship of its norms and on the other hand, to gain knowledge of the most important of the traditional dance repertoire, as well as the contributions that the Russian ballets, since the time of Diaghilev, had made to world dance.

In 1935, he accompanied Alicia Martínez (later Alicia Alonso) for the first time in the ballet Coppelia, and he became the first partner of the woman who years later would be the great ballerina of universal fame. There he alternated with the most important personalities of the international ballet era.

When he returns to Havana in 1941, he takes charge of the direction of the school at Pro Arte, which he is going to transform in a very positive way. Although he must admit to his classrooms students who pay to receive classes not intended for professional training, he takes charge of putting rigor into the lessons and with the support of a select group, very interested in the genre, he can allow himself to develop his initial choreographic work and even celebrate annual Ballet Festivals, for which he receives the support of Alicia and Fernando Alonso, who, at that time, work in the United States.

In this school he prepares many works from the repertoire of the Russian Ballets. He made his debut as a choreographer in 1942 with Preludes, set to music by Liszt. In this way he became the first Cuban choreographer for ballet.

In 1943 Alberto creates some of his notable works: Concerto, a "abstract" ballet based on the music of a Vivaldi concerto, recreated by Johann Sebastian Bach; Forma, a very ambitious work, supported by a score by José Ardévol and a poem by José Lezama Lima and with the direct participation of the Coral de La Habana, conducted by María Muñoz. We must also not forget his Icaro, which is a free version of the original by Sergio Lifar, which he Cubanized with the support of the young composer Harold Gramatges, who conceived an entire complex percussion accompaniment for the male solo.

In the 1944-1945 season he is principal dancer of the Ballet Theatre of New York (today American Ballet Theatre) and acts in the dances of the film Yolanda, in Hollywood, starring actor and dancer Fred Astaire.

However, the great scandal was about to break loose on May 27, 1947, with the premiere at the Auditórium Theater of his ballet Before Dawn. The elegant associates watched with undisguised repulsion that ballet, which far from being set in a world of fairies, took place in a Havana tenement house, where its protagonist Chela – embodied by Alicia Alonso – abandoned by the man she loves, commits suicide by setting herself on fire. If the designs by Carlos Enríquez were provocative in recreating the dilapidated old house that had become a "tenement," with the staircase down which the protagonist descended, already wrapped in the flames of alcohol, to the rhythm of a columbia, so too was the score by Hilario González, which integrated popular rhythms from rumba to bolero and the "botecito." Alberto's choreography forced the dancers to leave academic stiffness, to move with the sensuality of Cuban dance. It was the first time on the Island that ballet was linked to the most pressing social problems.

A year later, the creation of the Alicia Alonso Ballet became the foundation for the development of professional scenic dance in Cuba; the choreographer was there, alongside Alicia and Fernando. This would not constitute a constraint on his versatile talent. Without ceasing to create at the Ballet School of the Pro Arte Musical Society, of which he was director, he also ventured into other media such as cabaret and television. In addition to the language of academic dance, he learned perfectly the language of Cuban popular dance, this marked his work in an essential way and gave him success such as the spectacle The tenement which would eventually have a film version under the title A Day in the Tenement.

In 1948, together with his brother Fernando Alonso and his sister-in-law Alicia, he founded the Alicia Alonso Ballet (today Ballet Nacional de Cuba), of which he is principal dancer, artistic director and choreographer. With this company he traveled throughout Latin America on his first international tour and contributed the creations: La valse, Forma, Concerto, Classical Symphony and Romeo and Juliet (premiered for the first time on the American continent).

Between 1948 and 1953 he teaches classes at the Municipal Conservatory of Havana. As a teacher, Alberto Alonso introduces a new vocabulary for ballet by mixing the academic with sensual movements from our popular dances and Afro-Cuban folkloric traditions.

His work, now with a more favorable framework for its development, underwent frank maturation in the 1950s, suffice it to recall that in 1956 his ambitious complete version of Romeo and Juliet premiered, set to Prokofiev's score, for the Alicia Alonso Ballet, while the following year, on September 13, he premiered on Cuban Television, La rebambaramba, ballet by Amadeo Roldán with libretto by Alejo Carpentier, which had failed to reach the stage during the composer's lifetime and had only been played in concerts and for which he made a notable version, featuring Sonia Calero as soloist and with actors Eduardo Egea and Enrique Almirante and under the musical direction of Enrique González Mántici.

Tours expanded after 1959 with The güije, Space and Movement, Conjugation, Tribute to White, Stormy Peaks and Lost Diary. In his desire to give choreography a fully Cuban profile, he founded the Ballet Nacional in 1950, whose existence was brief (only three years), work that he alternated with that of choreographer in the nascent Cuban television and in the cabarets Montmartre, Sans Souci and Riviera, and in the variety shows of the Radiocentro theater, among other nightclubs and theaters. In 1960 he creates the Dance Ensemble of Alberto Alonso, and in 1962 the Experimental Dance Ensemble of Havana, with which he undertakes a tour of Europe that opens the doors of the Olimpia Theater in Paris and several Eastern Bloc countries to him in 1965.

Following the revolutionary triumph, without abandoning his work in musical theater and the most varied spectacles, Alberto collaborated with the newly organized Ballet Nacional de Cuba, with which he was able to allow himself to experiment freely with works such as Space and Movement (1966) based on music by Stravinski; The güije (1967) derived from texts by Nicolás Guillén and Oscar Hurtado and supported by music by Juan Blanco, whose scene of the "Guateque" is an example of popular grace and adequate fusion of ballet with Cuban folklore; A Retablo for Romeo and Juliet (1969), a new venture on Shakespeare's classic, now with an even more "avant-garde" language and Conjugation (1970), based on a poem by Uruguayan Amanda Berenguer.

However, the work that would earn him world renown would be his very personal version of Carmen, based on the picturesque novel by Prosper Merimée, which captivated readers in Europe and America with its colorful vision of a Seville, seen as the ideal setting for the tempestuous love affairs of a Sevillian cigar-maker who finds death at the hands of a former spurned lover, the young officer Don José. This had already inspired other stage versions: in 1846, a year after the book appeared, the young French choreographer Marius Petipa, father of Russian ballet, presented in Madrid the ballet Carmen and her Torero – a work of which no traces remain – and in 1874 the French composer Georges Bizet premiered in Paris, at the Opéra-Comique, his Carmen, which achieved decisive success after an initial resounding failure. The celebrated French choreographer Roland Petit seemed to have achieved a definitive dance version for the theme in 1949, when he conceived the role of the cigar-maker for dancer Zizi Jeanmaire in a satirical manner, since the elements that were tragic in the opera had a parodic character in his piece, reinforced by the coexistence of classical dance language with that of the music hall. None of this was going to hinder the success of the Cuban Carmen.

It was Maia Plisetskaia who prompted the creation of the work. After attending a presentation of The Tenement, she approached Alberto Alonso and asked him to work with her on a version of Carmen conceived "in a new way, without adhering to tradition," it is said that the choreographer answered her: "How did you guess my thoughts? That is my dream!" The composer Rodion Schedrin, husband of the dancer, orchestrated a suite derived from Bizet's opera, in which much emphasis was placed on the dramatic, from it, choreographer, musician and dancer worked together on the work. Beyond the intentions of the artists, the matter even had political significance: it was the first time since 1917 that a foreign choreographer had been invited to stage a production on the stage of the Bolshoi.

When Alberto Alonso heard more than twenty minutes of ovations that greeted the premiere of this work, on the rather cold Moscow night of April 20, 1967 and even more, when he could observe that those spectators, usually serious and measured, resisted abandoning the enormous Bolshoi hall an hour after the curtain had closed, to hide the lifeless figure of Plisetskaia, perhaps then he could sense that he had created the ballet that would immortalize him.

After the singular success of the premiere, the star made the role her own, which she treated with such strength and audacity, that certain critics and some members of the company's management showed their displeasure and even conducted a kind of silent war against her for years, supported by the way in which this work contradicted the company's fidelity to the line of "socialist realism," but most of the public knew what to expect and it was almost impossible to obtain a ticket even three decades later, when the billboards announced a revival of the ballet.

The work premiered in Cuba on August 1, 1967, with Alicia Alonso and Azari Plisetski in the central roles. The Cuban artist took possession of the character and paraded it around the world – including the USSR – with general acquiescence. Alicia emphasized in her interpretation what the work owed to the classical heritage, resolved all the steps with wonderful fluidity and used her Hispanic ancestors to make believable the story of fatality that marked the destiny of the cigar-maker. Maia preferred to highlight the contemporary components of the work, her character was harder, more carefree, to the point of brazeness, one could say that what was essential for her was to dynamite a certain tradition of false respectability in which Russian ballet was ossifying.

The stagings of this work succeeded each other rapidly, Alberto was invited from the most varied points of the universe to stage his work, this led him to tour stages in Sofia, Helsinki, Pécs, Tokyo, Milan, Berlin and New York, to cite only a few.

Although the creator had found his definitive work there, his work still continued in the most varied stagings. Who doesn't remember his very Cuban version of The Rumba? Or that Classical Symphony by Prokofiev which he worked with singular humor and which premiered on February 9, 1955, on the occasion of Alicia Alonso's debut on Cuban Television and which he recreated in 1982 for the Ballet de Camagüey. For this same company he mounted in 1989 an ambitious Medea where dance was mixed with declamation and tragic choruses, which suggested a return to the youthful searches of Forma.

Alberto Alonso is also resident choreographer of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in several periods: Director of the Musical Theater of Havana, of the National Entertainment Ensemble and guest choreographer of Cuban companies: National Folkloric Ensemble and Ballet de Camagüey; and of foreign companies in Bulgaria, Hungary, Japan, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Spain and the United States, the country where he lived from the 1990s onwards until his death.

Although, by personal decision, Alberto Alonso resided in recent decades outside the Island, his teaching was never absent from Cuban ballet. His work is so profoundly embedded in our culture, that it is now impossible to separate it from the island way of dancing and conceiving the spectacle, whether in the most humble rumba or when performing that Carmen, alongside which always go Destiny and Death, and which, taken from Merimée's picturesque Seville, has become definitively ours.

Alberto Alonso, although he was married on two previous occasions to dancers Alexandra Denísova and Elena del Cueto, his marriage to fellow dancer Sonia Calero meant a prominent professional partnership. For her he creates the pieces: The Rumba and The Tenement, full of authenticity and creativity. The most notable figure of Cuban choreography in the twentieth century, for his international trajectory and for having instilled into Cuban ballet the tropical air of our people, without falling into picturesqueness or stereotypes, nor abandoning the essences of the most strict academicism.