Alicia Alonso: legend of spirit and style: Cuba's prima ballerina has enthralled audiences worldwide while shaping a new, distinct generation of classical dancers.

• Author: Durbin, Paula

"I admire many dance companies, but actually love comparatively few. Among those I love is the Ballet Nacional de Cuba," Dance Magazine's senior critic Clive Barnes confessed in his review of the troupe's New York performances last fall. Like Barnes, ballet-goers everywhere applaud the silken bravura of the dancers whom Alicia Alonso, ballet legend extraordinaire and the Ballet's founder and general director, has fashioned into Latin America's premier classical company. Now eighty-two, Alonso only stopped perforating in 1995, and her progeny stand on their own two feet. But they bear her imprimatur, and it links them to the U.S. tradition in classical dance.

After considerable vetting, the Ballet's publicists agreed to arrange an interview with Alonso in a room off City Center's main hail following the Saturday matinee. As I watched Alonso emerge with the throng of New Yorkers exiting the theater, it occurred to me that this meeting would bring me full circle. Alicia Alonso was the first ballerina I ever saw perform, shortly after tying on my first pair of point shoes, cementing my earliest bonding with dance. And while I had written about the vitality of dance throughout the hemisphere, and the Latin American invasion of the international stage in particular, I had yet to write the preface to that phenomenon, which is Alonso's own fabulous story.

Born Alicia Martinez, Alonso first studied ballet in Havana with Nikolai Yavorksy, a former artillery officer in the czar's army. In 1936, just three years after George Balanchine had arrived from Europe to help get ballet off the ground in the United States, she followed dancer Fernando Alonso, then her boyfriend and now her ex-husband, to New York City. Soon she became a mother, but that didn't stop her from studying with the best teachers, paying her dues on Broadway, and becoming, in 1940, a charter member of American Ballet Theater. "My career went

from corps de ballet to prima ballerina and I danced in every corner of the United States," she says.

With ABT, and as a frequent guest with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Alonso not only triumphed in groundbreaking contemporary works, but broke the Russians' lock oil the classics. By the time she left New York in 1960, she was hailed, along with the Royal Ballet's Margot Fonteyn and the Bolshoi's Maya Plisetskaya, as prima ballerina assoluta, a rank reserved for the rare woman who can perform any role in the classical repertoire. Of these works, Giselle is widely considered the test of a dancer's merit, and Alonso is counted among the finest Giselles of all time--the only one on the A-list born in the Western Hemisphere. How she learned the entire ballet with her fingers during bed rest after the third of several operations to salvage her sight is a chapter in ballet lore topped only by her extended reign of glory in the title role.

Most of her audience never knew that problems ensuing from a detached retina bad left her virtually blind. Alonso's struggles with her vision have been chronicled throughout print media, and she has been profiled on 60 Minutes. But the ballet world, which judges everyone by the same uncompromising standards, hasn't fussed over Alonso's impairment and neither has she. In performance, in conversation, and in photographs...