Alicia Alonso (1920-2019)
Filed under the name Alicia · May 22, 2026
Alicia Alonso founded the National Ballet of Cuba and performed into her seventies, which as someone who mostly gets her exercise pushing a stroller for miles these days, is an absolutely staggering physical and artistic commitment to sustain across an entire lifetime. There's a visual composition to ballet that appeals to me deeply as a designer — the body as the actual medium, line and space and movement all working together the way color and layout do on a page — and Alonso apparently kept that instrument working at a serious level decades past when most dancers retire entirely. Founding an entire national company on top of her own performing career is its own separate, enormous achievement, essentially building the visual and institutional frame for generations of dancers who came after her. I think about legacy differently since having my daughter, less about what I make myself and more about what structure I leave for someone else to build inside. Alonso clearly built both, brilliantly, at once.