Wednesday, October 19 at 6:00 pm in the Marc Jacobs Reading Room
Join author Toba Singer in the Marc Jacobs Reading Room for a special presentation on Fernando Alonso, the Father of Cuban Ballet, to celebrate World Ballet Day.
Singer will discuss the roles that Alicia, Fernando and Alberto Alonso played in the founding of the Cuban National Ballet, its affiliated academy, and the method and manner in which Fernando developed the ballet training system based on a progressive curriculum and kinesiology that incorporated in an integral, not linear manner, elements from the French, Russian, Italian, Danish, and English schools, with influences from indigenous Latin and North American styles and tempos. Her talk will ask the question posed in Jennifer Homans’ exhaustive academic exploration of ballet, “Is classical ballet dying?” Homans’ book, while comprehensive, never mentions Cuba’s storied ballet history, nor its internationally recognized ballet training system.
“Written records of Alonso’s work are scarce, yet Toba Singer’s quest to spotlight his seminal role in the development of the modern ballet canon yields key material: pre-blockade tapes from Lincoln Center, Spanish-language sources from the Museum of Dance in Havana, and interviews with the ballet master himself alongside a broad range of friends, relatives, and collaborators from throughout his long career, including his ex-wife, Alicia, a famous ballerina in her own right.”—University Press of Florida
A book signing will conclude the event.
Toba Singer is the author of “First Position: A Century of Ballet Artists. From 2004 to 2010, Singer was the Dance Selector and Senior Program Director of the Art and Music Center of the San Francisco Public Library. She graduated from New York’s High School of Performing Arts, attended Boston University, and graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a BA in History and from the University of Maryland with an MLS. She has lived, worked, and written in Baltimore, Boston, the Bronx, Cambridge, Charleston (WV), Jersey City, Richmond (VA), San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Articles by her have appeared in the Charleston Gazette, San Francisco Chronicle, Dance Magazine, Pointe Magazine, the Provincetown Advocate, DanzaHoy, Dance Europe, Dance International, and the websites culturevulture.net and balletymas. Singer was a founding member of the board of Robert Moses’ Kin Dance Company, and a collection advisor to the San Francisco Museum for Performance and Design library. She completed two residencies at Santa Fe College. Singer studied ballet with Nina Anderson, Perry Brunson, Françoise Martinet, Richard Gibson, Zory Karah, anad Svetlana Afanasieva; modern dance with Cora Cahan, Gertrude Shurr, Jane Dudley, and Donald McKayle. Her son James Gotesky was a soloist with Houston Ballet. Singer lives with her husband Jim Gotesky in Oakland, California.
