Alicia Alonso: ‘Dancing was life – I had to express myself’

Published: 16 April 2010
by JOSH LOEB

ONE of the world’s greatest dancers came to London Metropolitan University in Holloway on Friday – and moved the audience with her words almost as much as she once did with her dancing.  

Alicia Alonso is a megastar in the world of ballet, having danced worldwide as a prima ballerina in the 1950s and 1960s.  

She has been virtually blind since the age of 19. Now 90, she continues to direct the Cuban National Ballet, which she founded and which performed recently in London as part of Sadler’s Wells spring dance season. 

In front of an audience of more than 100, which included Cuba’s ambassador to the UK, Rene Mujica, and Spanish prima ballerina Tamara Rojo, Ms Alonso spoke with Dr Luis Rodriguez de la Sierra, a psychoanalyst and dance lover who said it had been one of his life’s ambitions to interview her. 

Though often reluctant to speak about her blindness, Ms Alonso told Dr de la Sierra it was no obstacle to her work. 

“Someone tells me a story and I see it instantly,” she said. “I see where the dancers should be, how I should choreograph them.” 

Speaking to the Tribune before the interview, Dr de la Sierra recalled how he had seen Ms Alonso dance in the 1960s.

“At that time she was already severely visually impaired,” he said. “Apparently she indicated she could see colours and light on the floor, and that told her how far she could go.”

Alonso’s intelligence and wit were in evidence as she spoke about her friendship with Fidel Castro and art’s role in uniting people. 

At one point she denied she was old, apparently suggesting she was “going to be 15 soon”. Replying to a person who asked what plans she had for retirement, she said: “I will wait until I get to 100.” 

Dr de la Sierra asked how much of her work was due to “premeditated conscious feeling”, to which she replied: “If you think you can dance and not have a brain, you’re wrong. I have always been a hard worker – but work, it didn’t mean anything. It was my pleasure. For me, dancing was life.” 

Reflecting on the revolution, she said President Batista, Cuba’s dictator in the 1950s, had asked her to dance in 1959 but she had refused, and that Castro had visited her home to thank her for her support. 

“The first thing Castro did was to say everyone should learn to read and write,” she said. “We gave courses to peasants to read and write.” 

“And to dance?” asked Dr de la Sierra. Ms Alonso replied: “To be honest, we always did that.” 

She put forward a theory of dance, suggesting it was both the most basic and the most sophisticated art form. 

“First we had movement, then language, then music, then dance,” she said. “But dance is movement. An animal expresses itself in its movement. I have never known a person to talk all evening without movement.” 

She added: “When I was a child my mother put on the record player and I would dance for as long as the record was playing. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just had to express myself in that way.” 

At the end of her talk she told the audience it was important that people continued to be creative and do things “that make them alive”. 

She said: “I love life. I love dancing. I wish I could speak every language in the world because I love to communicate. I hate machines. We are the masters of the world, not machines. We are going to forget what it means to be alive, so that when we think of a human, we will think of a machine. We must not.” 

The event was part of “Connecting Conversations”, a series of talks sponsored by the Freud Museum and the Psychoanalytic Institute, and London Metropolitan University.