Fernando Alonso: The Father of Cuban Ballet

3. Alicia, Fernando, and Laura: Giant Steps across a Changing Landscape

17 3 Al]c]a, Fernando, and Laura Giant Steps across a Changing Landscape What was it like to make the transition from being students in Havana to dancers in New York? In 1937, New York was still coming out of the 1929 depression, and thousands remained unemployed. So, I was very lucky to immediately find a job as a bilingual stenographer at Powers X-Ray Products. I took ballet class at night. Then, Powers X-Ray Products sponsored a course in X-ray technology to train technicians for a tuberculosis survey in Harlem. I enrolled in the course and became an X-ray technician, a job that offered a better wage. You had lived in the United States before, but what was it like to live in New York? I was living right in the middle of New York’s largest black and Puerto Rican neighborhood, and so I was able to see the other face of that celebrated city: the racial prejudice and miserable living conditions in the tenements. It was not so different from what workers in Cuba’s barrios and those in the rest of Latin America faced every day of their lives. Once I was settled and had a job, I could send for Alicia. She was chaperoned by Natalia Arostegui, the wife of New York Cuban general consul, Pablo Suárez. They were friends of my parents. They all traveled to Manhattan by boat. We were married in 1937 and lived in a room I rented at 175th Street and Broadway in Washington Heights. It was part of a large apartment belonging to Irene Barbería, a Cuban woman of about sixty, who rented out rooms. Our room was both our living quarters and rehearsal studio. How were you able to gain entry to New York’s dance community? Part I. Antes (Before) 18 The Depression had changed the New York art scene permanently. Because of the WPA [Works Projects Administration], there was a revolutionary fervor wherever you looked. Before, artists had been out of work and hungry . Now, thousands of writers, artists, architects, actors, musicians, and dancers could find work and create art, some of which was not only art but also political art. They mounted works that revealed actual conditions of everyday life. Dancers were challenging the ballet traditions. They looked at everything in order to discover what felt authentic. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Anna Sokolow, Charles Weidman, Sophie Maslow, and Pauline Koner were among them. They had seen or heard about, or were influenced by, the work of Isadora Duncan. We arrived in New York during the Civil War in Spain. There was tremendous sympathy among the dancers and other artists for the republican combatants in Spain. They organized a “Dance Program for Spanish Democracy .” One of the groups on the program was Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan. That is how we got to know the Ballet Caravan dancers Eugene Loring, Lew Christensen, Erick Hawkins, and Marie-Jeanne. Alicia was pregnant, and I found her a doctor. The room we had rented would now have a nursery and a new personality inhabiting it—our daughter Laura! She was born on March 14, 1938. How did you manage to find regular jobs dancing? Mikhail Mordkin was a former premier danseur of the Bolshoi Ballet who had partnered Anna Pavlova at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. He settled in New York in 1924. He began his own school, and with help from Lucia Chase, restarted his own company. He hired me into his four-member corps de ballet for that company’s 1937–38 tour. The studio was upstairs at Carnegie Hall. Among the first dancers were Lucia Chase, Viola Essen, Karen Conrad, Dimitri Romanov, Leon Danielian , and myself. We toured in cities throughout North America. We performed Autumn Leaves to Glazunov’s The Seasons. Lucia Chase’s husband, Thomas Ewing, came from a family of millionaires and was able to underwrite the company’s expenses in the beginning, but when money ran out, all touring came to a standstill. Alicia saw the tour as an opportunity for herself and began to rehearse the repertoire with me, including the Peasant Pas from the first act of Giselle. She heard that the WPA was sponsoring classes by Enrico Zanfretta, a teacher who by then was in his mid-seventies. The classes were in the base- Alicia, Fernando, and Laura: Giant Steps...