A RIPPLE of applause, cheers and gasps of surprise ran through
the crowded theatre as an elderly woman, sharply dressed in a bluey-green
dress, slowly made her way with difficulty from the wings onto the
stage.
Knowing little about ballet, I asked my companion who she was.
“Alicia Alonso”, she whispered in awe.
I confess it was not until I glanced at the programme that I discovered
it had been my privilege to see the great Alicia Alonso, now 83,
a former world great ballerina, and now director of the Cuban ballet
company whose astonishing performance gave me such a high at Sadler’s
Wells theatre on Tuesday evening.
The last time I had seen them was in 1984 at the Dominion Theatre
– and that was the last time they had performed in the capital.
Having been wowed by them this week I am not surprised to discover
they are reckoned to be one of the world’s great ballet companies.
But who made them great? That elderly woman who smiled awkwardly
at the audience on Tuesday as they rose to give her a standing ovation.
She bowed slowly and, I thought, a little painfully, as if she suffered
from hip trouble – almost an industrial injury with ballet
dancers.
However, she had never been just a ballet dancer who rose to prominence
with the passing of years.
She had gone blind at the age of 19 but, miraculously, continued
to dance in the dark winning prize after prize. Then she returned
in the mid-1950s to her native Cuba, under Fidel Castro, and set
up the island’s first serious ballet school.
Their teachers are regularly asked to share their secrets with the
Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Ballet and companies in the US.
For her programme notes, a ballet critic, Ismene Brown of the Daily
Telegraph, asked how such a small island – population 11 million
– could produce so many fine dancers.
“Because we look at all the talent and wherever we find it
we give a free education,” said the great woman.
She added Cubans have “natural ballet potential” who have
African and Spanish rhythms “inside” them.
A fan of Castro, she is certain the Cuban government “benefits
the arts”.
Her views on children and education are food for thought.
“Our children go to school, we pick them up at 5pm, take them
to dancing until 8pm, they have dinner, then they study, then go
to bed,” she said.
“We are trying to take them off the streets, to learn art and
painting and music, and away from these ‘bwing-bwing’
computer games that make them idiots.”
She’s her father’s daughter
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Harriet Wistrich
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SHE came into the law late but Harriet Wistrich, a solicitor
at Camden Town-based campaigning law firm Birnberg Peirce, has
shone in the limelight recently.
Ms Wistrich, the daughter of former Labour councillors Ernest
and Enid Wistrich, is representing the family of Jean Charles
de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead by police on a
tube train in Stockwell on July 22.
The woman who has been so impressive in her attacks on Sir Ian
Blair and the tissue of half-truths surrounding de Menezes’
death was once an independent filmmaker, working with groups like
the London Women’s Centre Women.
She switched to a career in law in her early 30s after becoming
involved in political issues and carved quite a name for herself
working with victims of rape, among others.
When I met her at her Inverness Street office yesterday (Wednesday),
she was recovering from another round of media interviews –
although it would have been difficult to tell this from her demeanour.
The calm, collected Ms Wistrich, 45, a former pupil at Hampstead
School, told me the immediate issue was the integrity and independence
of the current inquiry.
“It has raised all sorts of issues about the shoot-to-kill
policy,” she said. “What is important is that a different
open inquiry and a public debate takes place as soon as possible.”
Of course, with parents like hers, it would have been hard not
to be socially conscious. “Growing up in a political household
definitely makes you more aware”, she told me.
Messages for Joseph
MY piece in last week’s paper about 96-year-old Professor
Joseph Rotblat, Nobel Peace prize winner, and now a patient at
a Camden hospital, has caused a stir.
Campaigners against nuclear weapons, peaceniks, Quakers and Buddhists
in different parts of Europe, US and Japan have spotted it on
the web, and sent off get-well messages to the hospital in a flood
of affection.
The professor, a much loved figure on the peace circuit, became
an acquaintance of our literary editor, Illtyd Harrington, when
he was chairman of the Greater London Council.
“He seemed a man of great humility – and it’s a
long journey to get to humility, and a lot of people don’t
achieve it,” Illtyd told me this week.
Good news about the great Rotblat, who lives in West Hampstead,
is that he is responding to drugs, getting better, and may be
discharged from hospital soon.
A great physicist who worked on the atom bomb project in the US
in the mid-1940s, Rotblat became a confirmed opponent of nuclear
proliferation, and rallied scientists to the cause from the 1950s
onwards.
When he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, he ended his lecture
with the words: “Above all, remember your humanity.
Ye Gods! Not very wise, eh?
THE architects of the London University College Hospital,
that shining new edifice that stands in Euston Road, were sniggered
at this week by the British Medical Journal.
According to the BMJ’s gossip column, Minerva – she
was the Roman Goddess of Wisdom (pictured here) – the architects
have only provided one toilet (unisex) and one rest room for 12
operating theatres, that is, for up to 80 doctors and nurses,
if all were in use at any one time.
This, of course, must breach most healthy and safety rules.
I rang the hospital on Tuesday to confirm the story, and, if possible,
for a comment – but they hadn’t got back to me by last
night
(Wednesday).
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