Fernando Alonso: The Father of Cuban Ballet

Lázaro Carreño and Yoel Carreño

137 Lázaro Carreño and Yoel Carreño When he was eleven, two years into his ballet training at the Cuban National Ballet School, Lázaro Carreño accepted a scholarship at the Leningrad Vaganova Institute, where Mikhail Baryshnikov was one of his contemporaries. Having won first place, and gold medals at international competitions, Carre ño began his teaching career in the 1970s, and among his students were Joan Boada, José Manuel Carreño (who is Lázaro’s nephew and Yoel’s halfbrother ), Luis Serrano, Carlos Acosta, and Lorena and Lorna Feijóo. His career has taken him from Havana to Zaragoza, from Madrid to Houston and Caracas, from the Ballet du Rhin to Lodz. Yoel Carreño, Lázaro’s nephew, began as a student at the Alejo Carpentier Provincial School of Ballet, and in 1998 he graduated from the National School of the Arts. He then entered the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. As a student he won the Gold Medal at the Fifth Encuentro Internacional de Academias de Ballet in Havana. He has performed with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in Europe, the Americas, and Asia and is currently dancing with the Norwegian National Ballet. I was able to interview Lázaro Carreño and Yoel Carreño at the Ballet Nacional de Cuba building on Calzada in Havana, on November 2, 2008, during the Twenty-First International Ballet Festival, where Lázaro had just taught and where Yoel had just taken company class. Yoel was performing several pieces from the company’s repertoire during the festival. What did Fernando Alonso contribute to your development as a dancer that no one else has? Yoel: Honestly, I worked very little with the maestro, but have been able to become close with him, and he has provided me with a source of wisdom and knowledge, an understanding of dance, unlike any other person. He is a living legend, an encyclopedia. The way he reasons gives you a different concept. He opens alternative paths, new ways of seeing what you are doing, helping you to improve immensely. Lázaro: Fernando was my first teacher at the National School. He was the founder, and as the director, he would give class. Even though at first he was teaching only girls’ class, after having been in the company for a while I got a chance to work with him as a teacher and repetiteur. As my nephew says, Part III. Recuerdos (Recollections) 138 he’s an exquisite person who looks after each detail, technically as well as artistically. He is a very wise and cultured person, with an ample vocabulary, and he’s very explicit while teaching or explaining what he wants you to know. That’s very important. He has always set an example for the company as a professional, in his discipline and work habits. He represents all those things in a single individual for the Cuban National Ballet. We truly felt his absence when he left. We really needed him with us here. I have heard the maestro give a dancer a correction and follow it up with the words “Now make a habit of it.” What habits have you learned from Fernando Alonso? Lázaro: He didn’t used to say that to everyone. It was just a habit that he had when he was corrected. It was a habit he used when correcting the dancer, but in a general way a method for letting the dancer know what he or she did wrong. To make a habit of a correction means that every time you do something wrong, you must remember the correction and never forget it; always keep it in mind to keep repeating that step correctly so you keep improving. It’s a pedagogical method to make the student understand his or her mistake and why it happened, because there are students to whom you may say something once and they never repeat the mistake, but there are others you must correct over and over for the same mistake. So to “make a habit of it” makes the dancer understand how important it is to be corrected and how important it is not to repeat the mistake, that there is a reason for everything that is taught. Yoel: I agree completely. What do the words “Cuban style” mean to you? Yoel: The Cuban or Latin technique has to do with our roots. We have a very distinct characteristic that one can notice when observing...