Alonso was Cuban ballet, and she was Giselle. I well remember seeing her perform the role with American Ballet Theatre (where her career first took off) at the Metropolitan Opera in 1977. I was with my mother and had to cross a picket line of anti-Castro protesters, and wait as police cleared the house after a bomb threat. For much of her career, Alonso was partially blind and she had learned to navigate a stage, and a partner, without relying on sight. I don’t know how much she could see that night, but I remember the poignancy of her aging body (she was fifty-seven), the careful calculations of her movement. She seemed to be dancing in her own world—a quality that is uncannily present in Markosian’s shadowy, ghostly bride.
There is another bride in this story, too—one from Markosian’s own past. Her ballet bride recalls an earlier photograph, in which she reimagines her mother as what looks like a kind of fairy-tale bride. The image was part of a project that used staged photographs to re-create the story of how Markosian, who was born in Moscow, came to the United States. The tale, as mythic as any ballet, begins after the fall of the U.S.S.R. Markosian’s mother found herself poor and alone in Moscow with two small children. In the evenings, she took solace in watching, with her daughter, the American soap opera “Santa Barbara.” Intoxicated by its glamorous California ethos, and desperate to leave Russia for a better life, she contacted an agency that matched women with American men and placed an ad that was answered by a man in Santa Barbara. One night, she woke her bewildered children and took them to the airport, where they all boarded a flight to a new life with this unknown man, who became their stepfather.
