Cuba Honors Alicia Alonso on the 90th Anniversary of her Birth
 

LAS TUNAS, Cuba, Feb 6 (P26/acn).- An international program to mark the 90th birthday of Prima Ballerina Assoluta Alicia Alonso, director of the Cuban National Ballet (BNC, by its Spanish acronym), started on Friday in this city.

 

The world-known ballerina and choreographer was awarded with replicas of the Shield of the City and the Pen of Juan Cristobal Napoles Fajardo, El Cucalambé, the most important Cuban bucolic poet of the nineteenth century, in ceremony held at the Vicente García’s Memorial House.

 

"It's hard to describe how it feels to receive many honors and with so much love ... I've been here four times and all I have left a piece of my heart," said grateful.

 

Alonso arrived in Las Tunas on Wednesday evening accompanied by a representation of the BNC, as part of a tour through several cities of the country that marks the beginning of a series of activities in her honor.

The program scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Las Tunas Theater, includes: “A concert in Black and White,” a piece representative of neoclassicism in Cuba, and “Adagio of the Rose,” one of the most famous
scenes of “The Sleeping Beauty of the Forest.”

 

The BNC’s historian Miguel Cabrera  staged the didactic show An encounter with dance: technique, expression and style,  and the book De la semilla al fruto: la compañía, about the BNC history by journalist Jose Luis Estrada Betancourt, with the Juventud Rebelde daily news, were presented.

Alicia Alonso is one of the most outstanding personalities in the history of dance and the top figure of ballet in Iberian America.

She was born on December 21, 1920, in Havana, where she started to take ballet lessons in the Ballet School of the Pro-Art Musical Society in 1931.

Later on, she moved to the United States where she continued her training as a dancer with Enrico Zanfretta, Alexandra Fedórova and several eminent professors of the American Ballet School.

Her professional career started in 1938, when she debuted in Broadway with the musical comedies ‘Great Lady’ and ‘Stars in Your Eyes’.

Back in Havana, she founded in 1948 the Alicia Alonso Ballet that later became the Cuban National Ballet. As director of the company, Alonso has guided several generations of Cuban dancers with her own style that has won her a significant place in the international ballet.