Black Dancers and White Ballet: Case of Cuba

Abstract

Throughout the XX century, the hard-fought battle of blacks and dark-skinned dancers to perform the classical repertoire on professional stages (including “white ballets”) was a part of the struggle for citizens’ equality. Cuba is a clear example of creating a national ballet school in a country where the fight for social equality was closely connected with overcoming racial segregation. But some researchers have noted that the majority of dancers in the Ballet Nacional de Cuba belong to the Caucasoid phenotype, which means they do not represent the Cuban nation which includes a large variety of phenotypes. We pose the question in what way is the history of Cuban ballet and the artistic experience of its founders connected with the struggle of blacks to have professional dancing careers, and is there actually racial discrimination in Cuban ballet? We demonstrate that the Alonso triumvirate was a good indicator of the problem: Alicia and Fernando as performers, and Alberto Alonso as a choreographer, participated in a cultural movement directed at the rebirth of Cuban identity, they performed African American dances, and they worked together with George Balanchine, who adapted black dance and invited black dancers into his company. However, due to various reasons and circumstances, Alicia Alonso, first for herself and then for the Nacional ballet school and theatre, took a different path, that of entering, on equal footing, the domain of classical ballet, of European art in its essence, in which the white aesthetic is inherent. We would like to demonstrate that the main explanation of the paradox of Cuban ballet became the aesthetic dictatorship of the classics, the dictatorship within “white ballet” which is accepted voluntarily. Classical ballet is an art of subordination to rules and images that are thought of as absolute pinnacles.