Mireya Castañeda

THE founding of the National School of Art in 1962 initiated a cultural explosion which continues bearing fruits. Ballet, music, dramatic and visual arts were the first specialties.

Teaching of modern and folkloric dance was initiated in 1965, circus arts in 1977 and musical shows in 1993. This system of arts teaching, at the elementary and intermediate level, was extended to the university level in 1976, through the Higher Institute of Art (ISA).

It is fitting to begin celebrations for this 50th anniversary with one of the most outstanding cultural events of the last century: the emergence of the Cuban school of ballet, at the instigation of the great figures of Alicia, Fernando and Alberto Alonso, which gave rise to a method of teaching.

A precision best left to Alicia Alonso, prima ballerina assoluta, "A school in the sense of style… of a particular, distinctive form, which differentiates dancers who have been trained within the same technical and artistic criteria… Of course, this has everything to do with the training centers… with a specific method…" (Paper presented at the National School of Art in 1976).

A specific method, "here is the question." It is not possible to give a historic account of the Cuban school of ballet or its antecedents here. Just some details: the creation of the Alicia Alonso Ballet in 1948 and the Academy of the same name in 1950, where the ethical and aesthetic bases of this method were developed.

With the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, the Alicia Alonso Academy ended its private nature and became part of the National School of Art.

Who better than one of the disciples of Alicia and Fernando, a notable figure in the pedagogy of dance in the contemporary world, and current director of the National School of Ballet, Ramona de Sáa, to explain the development of ballet teaching in Cuba?

The dialogue with the outstanding maitre in classrooms of the National Ballet of Cuba, was extensive and detailed.

We are outside the School, based since 2000 in a beautiful mansion on Paseo del Prado and currently undergoing repairs.

The Cuban school of ballet is a system, a methodology created by the maestro Fernando Alonso and prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso, who has been the inspiration for all of this method. There has been a total interrelation of dancer-maestro-maitre-professor. Little by little they set about analyzing according to biotypes and including the climatic characteristics of our country, in order to work out be the most scientific form of teaching for young people from the age of nine or even seven years, and then began to create a method.

The first characteristic is that our years of study are systematically composed of units, it is not a relation of movements. Teaching is a spiral, from the simplest to the most complex forms of execution. We have a first and second phase of learning, facing the bar, then in profile, and one very important detail, classes are gender separated. For that reason, we can give ourselves the luxury of showing a highly differentiated women’s dance and the virility of male dancers.

This is also the case in some other countries where there is a school as marked as the Russian, and in France and Italy. Ours is always gender separated, from the first elementary year. And then we have our own characteristics in movements, of attack, dynamic. We insist a lot that we start out from balance, a movement is executed with balance and we fall with balance. There are a whole series of technical objectives which is what distinguishes the Cuban school of ballet as training, as method and later, in stage performances. The role we give to pantomime, it isn’t about moving and showing, but about how all of the action is interrelated, whether it is Giselle, Coppelia or Swan Lake. We have a work table in relation to acting. That’s one of the characteristics of our school and both Alicia and Fernando have always been very insistent on this.

I would like to highlight something very important, what a great honor it is for the school of ballet to have Alicia and Fernando, its founders, among us. They are present and interested in how the pupils are developing, how teacher retraining is going, how we are teaching such and such a movement. It is a constant supervision that we have in relation to the Cuban school of ballet as a teaching method.

A lot of emphasis has been placed on selection. Today (February 17), we are doing the second selection test; there are three. For the elementary level, for 9-10 year olds who have completed fourth grade. First, the physical aspect, then flexibility of body extensions, level of jumping; we have them improvise, we measure sense of rhythm, aspects that they are going to need later for their development. There is also a medical check, psychological parameters, because there are children who have many of the necessary conditions, but their intelligence quota is not sufficient to carry the specialty and their general education as a whole. The children we select don’t usually have enough time to get home by seven in the evening and study, they have to assimilate that in the classroom. It is a career they begin as young children and which demands a lot of sacrifice. I should tell you something very important, the elementary level is vocational; then in the fifth year, aged 13-14 years, there is an examination for entry into the half-professional school. Not all of the students who enter at the elementary level continue their studies. It’s costing us a lot of work, because there are 15 places for females and 15 for males at the intermediate level and it’s also more selective at the elementary level. The fact is that the country’s need for dancers is already being met. The best dancers move on to the National Ballet, those of Camagüey, Santiago de Cuba and Holguín, and we have provided a good pool for the Television Ballet.

This year is a graduation one for 20-25 students, but last year there were more than 40, and it was difficult to place them. The BNC as well is constantly more selective, it already has a large youthful company. They are asking for entry parameters based on height, biophysical aspects. Previously that could fluctuate a little but now there’s a standard. With these standards, we are competing with European companies, which select dancers from all over the world, and we are selecting them from our schools (11 elementary schools throughout the country and two at intermediate level, Havana and Camagüey), which for me is a fundamental success.

That era was great. First, when in 1961 Fernando called the founder members, Aurora, Mirta, Josefina, Laura Alonso, Joaquín Banegas, my sister Margarita, Adolfo Roval, and me to his office – I remember it as if it were today – to tell as about the plan for the National School of Ballet and that we were going to give classes. We all looked at each other, we were very young, we were dancing in the company. First of all came the large selection of girls. But, for the boys, we had to go to the Orphanage, because at that time boys didn’t want to study dance, neither did their parents want them to, as they didn’t see dancing as a profession. This is another of the School’s achievements, with government support. Using educational talks in schools we began to achieve a larger pool of boys, but it wasn’t until three to four years ago that this prejudice was removed from people’s minds. In that period we had constant seminars and open classes, both from Fernando and Alicia. Sometimes we thought that we were doing excellently and they destroyed that, in a strictly educational way, to gradually train us. Both of them had a great vision of the future, to incorporate the study plans of the Alicia Alonso Academy into the National School, with structural adjustments, because from the outset the specialty was planned in conjunction with comprehensive education studies. That was what made it possible to have a totally national company with in such a short time.

I was 23 years old when Fernando said to me, "You know cherie (as they called all of us), I’m thinking that you should take over as director of the School. The thing is, that he was also carrying the company. I was agitated, ‘I can’t, I can’t’. They had always helped me and had never left me on my own. I took it on with fear because of being unable to say no. We were a family, those were beautiful times. We gave classes in the Cubanacán neighborhood, then our own classes in the main school, we danced, it was all feedback. I would say that when they told you to lower your arm, you eliminated that defect when you gave a class. Dance is purely visual. That is why it’s so important that the teacher demonstrates well and is inspired in his or her classes. This is another characteristic, we have very good teachers from one and the same school, but with many individual aspects, and that’s very important for the students, to hear various voices of command, transmitted experience. That’s a marvelous phenomenon within our teaching.

Excellent dancers have passed through my hands, I have trained them. They always mention me. Carlos Acosta thinks of me as a mother, because we did very good work outside of the classroom. As they did with us. Imagine, he didn’t want to be a dancer, because of the milieu from which he came, it was his father who wanted him to be one. We were very identified with him. Also with Lorna and Lorena Feijoo, Viengsay Valdés, Anette Delgado. When Anette went to take the intermediate exam, she was a little thing and the jury didn’t want to accept her for that level, I managed to convince them and they finally took her. She knows that, she’s always saying so. When we had the 1st International Competition I trained her and she won the Gold Medal. They are always affectionately thanking me.

I think the most important one is in the classroom, the training they have with their teacher, as I used to say to Junior (Carlos Acosta), when I was preparing him for Lausanne, Switzerland, where he won the Grand Prix and the Gold Medal at 16 years of age. It was a competition for who could most resist the training with him receiving and myself giving. It was very nice, I always told him, we’re training you, but don’t go with the idea of the prize in your head. Use it as experience. That’s the most important thing about competitions. I am saying that when a dancer is well trained, even though there are sometimes non-artistic criteria within the jury, his or her indisputable stature always imposes itself. This can be seen very clearly in current competitions. Since 1964 in Varna, when (Arnold) Haskell saw the Jewels [Loipa Auaújo, Aurora Bosch, Josefina Méndez and Mirta Pla] and said, ‘We are seeing the phenomenon of the birth of a new school.’ We are the youngest school that exists, in continuous development with its living founders. International confrontation on the stage is important. There are people with good training but their legs go weak, they are human beings.

Yes, many, they have emerged spontaneously, the technique of turns has shone out. The secret is balance. Alicia always had very good balance. Josefina Méndez as well, all of them. It is a very important characteristic within dance as corporal expression and domination. This year we have emphasized interpretation, for that very reason you were saying, that more importance is given to technique, but artists have to emerge from their classes. From the elementary level, we work a lot on legs and incorporate the port de bras, the sense of dance, the angles of the room, aspects that we are reinforcing.

We are not going to do the event that we had planned because of the problem at the School headquarters. We will have one week in the Mella, and two (April 1-15) in the Lorca Theater. The inaugural performance will have the parade of graduates and then a BNC Gala for the School.

Yes, I am satisfied. The achievements lie in the Company, all graduates of the School. I feel satisfied with the work we have done, my small contribution to ballet in Cuba, one of the heritages of our culture and, above all, with having had Fernando and Alicia as teachers, as well as spiritual parents. It is an immense satisfaction not to have defrauded what was handed down to us as a continuation of the founders.