Alicia Alonso International Dance Competition

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1996 by Leslie R. Myers

The beguiling "Pearl of the Antilles," Cuba, is in ruins--an unintentional display of the last outpost of the former Soviet empire. Beyond the food rations that run out just ten days into the month, some Cubans seem to live on dance alone.

It is a woman named Alonso, of course, who uses ballet to feed the Cuban spirit. Ignoring the impossibility of it all, she summoned the world to Cuba's first international ballet competition in June. Ten countries, including the United States, participated. This time the principal Alonso was Laura, the second generation to champion ballet as one of Cuba's national passions. This time the honoree--applauded for her decades as Cuba's premiere ballerina--was her mother, Alicia Alonso.

The first Alicia Alonso International Dance Competition ran from June 1 through 9 in Havana's palatial Gran Teatro, regarded as one of the world's great opera houses.

"My mother has stopped dancing; I did the competition so she will always dance [in our memories]," said Laura Alonso, the competition's artistic director. "I don't want her name [to be one] you'll have to look up in history books."

Highly unlikely in Cuba. Throngs of applauding fans greeted their longtime dance diva as if she were royalty, as she entered and exited the competition's opening and closing galas. Blind for much of her life, Alicia Alonso still takes barre every morning, but, because of a weakened hip, she is unable to dance. She did perform Giselle in the Gran Teatro as recently as 1993, marking the fiftieth anniversary of her New York debut in the role.

Alicia Alonso said that the competition was "very beautiful. It's very hard work--very difficult....The economic conditions for the Cubans are very difficult. It is something the whole world knows; they've been protesting about it. But we believe in what we're doing, in our dancing, in our work--that it doesn't destroy anything. It constructs."

In the two-round competition fifty-three dancers in three age divisions competed in two categories: classical and neoclassical-contemporary. Entrants came from Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Canada, Japan, and the United States. Scores of noncompeting dancers performed in a choreography category.

The sixteen-member jury consisted of ten Cubans, including Laura Alonso as chair; Thalia Mara of the United States; Arnold Spohr of Canada; Paz Diaz of Spain; Maria Clara Salles of Brazil; Alejandro Yori of Peru; and Rodolfo Reyes of Mexico.

"For a first competition, Laura carried it off very well," said Mara, founding artistic director of the U.S.A. International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi. "It was well done."

In Round One, four dancers seized the attention of both audience and jury: Cuban Rolando Sarabia, 13; American Oliver Halkowich, 13, of Miami; and Cuban partners Idania la Villa, 20, and Yasser Diaz, 19. In the male children's division, Sarabia won the gold medal, and silver went to Halkowich. In the senior division, la Villa and Diaz each won gold. The medal count was: Cuba, four gold, six silver, seven bronze; Brazil, two silver; Argentina, one gold; Japan, one silver; United States, one silver; and Peru, one bronze.

Laura Alonso is the founder and general director of Centro pro Danza, Cuba's only self-supporting dance school and company, which funded the competition. She said that Cuba's competition was inspired by her 1990 and 1994 trips to the Jackson IBC, where she won the Black Swan Award for Distinguished Coaching for her work with competitors from various countries. Her student, current American Ballet Theatre star Jose Manuel Carreno, won the 1990 Jackson Grand Prix.

The next Alicia Alonso competition is tentatively set for May 2 through 13, 1997. Thereafter, it will run every two years.