meets the urban woman, dressed in Gypsy robes, a kind of arcadian bliss mixed with self-satisfaction in which early twentieth-century artists swam.
Caricature (1934) of Argentina in Belero clásico by Iradier, at the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique in 1929.
Performance of Bolero Clásico, 1929, costume by Iradier.
From this initial literary exploration of Spanish folk forms, Argentina, being a dancer, decided that the best way of learning the flamenco dance styles was to do them. Several months after her father’s death, Argentina accepted an engagement in a Sevillian café cantante, and, performing as part of a cuadro, or flamenco corps de ballet, earned enough to pay her room and board, dancing at the beginning of the evening, as the stars danced last. Next, Argentina observed the flamenco greats of the period, including La Macarona and La Malena. Argentina then auditioned for the permanent troupe of the Teatro Variedad.46 She performed well. Out of roughly fifty flamenco auditioners, Argentina, although still relatively unfamiliar with the enormous repertory of flamenco lettras, performed the “Soleares de Arca” successfully and was accepted into the company.47 “I worked for one year in this theater,” recalled Argentina. “I earned five pesetas a day.”48
In the summer of 1905, Argentina moved to Barcelona for a one-year engagement dancing in a flamenco tablao (show). She debuted as a flamenca on 1 June at the Allaran Español music hall.49 She was miserable. “They all made my life unbearable. People laughed at me and criticized me, but paradoxically, imitated me…. They thought my dance style was refined and stylish.”50 What dances Argentina performed in Barcelona remains unknown, although she was most likely one of many young women included in an all-female cuadro that filled in between solo dances in order to give the principals time to rest. She learned rhythms through imitation, perhaps soliciting advice and demonstrations from more experienced Gypsy dancers. Both flamenco and Spanish classical technique require a controlled, vertical, yet elastic upper torso, Argentina had been trained at the conservatory to interpret dance well. She quickly understood the complex, rhythmic hierarchy required by the flamenco canon: a head that moves in contratiempo to the feet, counting rhythm, turning from side to side, right to left. It was most likely the initial footwork (zapateado) and the accompanying sung verses (coplas) that proved most difficult for Argentina to master. But a Gypsy community utilized the innate sense of rhythm created by singer, guitarist, and dancer. (She would return again in 1908, with a growing reputation among Spanish and South American intelligentsia and balletomanes. This time, she would go to the Teatro Arnau and the Salón Doré.)
In the early twentieth century, Barcelona was the most industrialized region of Spain, as well as its leading commercial center. Although frequented by Gypsies, the city’s tablaos were filled with foreigners, also doing business in the Catalan capital. A common evening entertainment was the flamenco café or bar where Spaniards, European businessmen, flamenco aficionados, and tourists gathered. In this atmosphere, Argentina danced and perfected her knowledge of the complicated flamenco technique. The flamenco cuadro was in no way protected from its audience, which was composed, at times, of rowdy drunks. The café owners in big cities like Barcelona were not always flamenco experts, or aficionados, but businessmen interested in profit. The well-being of female performers, each one easily replaceable if she complained, was overestimated. And, unlike the Teatro Real, where dancers came under the scrutiny of teachers, rehearsal mistresses and masters, and directors, a flamenco company could easily be harassed by the boss.
It was in this gritty, unsafe atmosphere, where one appeared with guitarists, singers, and fellow dancers who could alter rhythms during performance, along with the uncomfortable nature of dancing in a bar, that Argentina began to learn what rhythms underlay the dance and song of the Gypsy. After a year, she left and traveled west to Seville. There she studied intensively with gitanas flamencas, fat, elderly dancers who taught her as many step patterns and rhythmic sequences as she could absorb. She departed for the French capital at the end of 1905.
Argentina obtained a three-month contract at the Jardin de Paris, dancing as one of a hundred “girls” in the corps. The Jardin was one of the largest outdoor cafés chantants in Paris, and therefore, a very visible place to begin a French career on the music hall stage. Located on the edge of the Place de la Concorde, on the leffhand corner of the Avénue des Champs-Elysées as one faces the Etoile, the Jardine’s tables were shaded by the treetops of the Champs-Elysées.51 “Between a tyrolienne singer,” wrote Edouard Beaudu, “and a baronne who does his haute école, Argentina danced and astonished. Her thin arms, held just above the head, the soft clack of her heel-work, and her hands always beating the castanets… She was a goddess with a long train behind her”—the traditional bata de cola.52 Dancing several months in Paris, she returned to Spain, again picking up her engagement in Barcelona.
Although Argentina was unhappy dancing in Barcelona, she cited in her essays her early work in peñas (flamenco bars) as the beginning of her flamenco education. For the next few years, aside from dancing to support her mother and brother, Argentina became totally absorbed by the study of flamenco, its rhythms, singers, guitarists, dancers, and castanets. These instruments Argentina eventually made the protagonists of entire orchestral performances, although she had never considered them concert instruments in their own right. Castanets and the intricate zapateado sequences would become Argentina’s signatures, countering time with time, answering the arpeggios of guitar, violin, and voice.
Within the flamenco genre adopted and later adapted by Argentina, time represented everything. Representing only an idea—the idea of itself on the stage—time was revealed to the audience through rhythm and counterrhythm produced by dancer, solo guitar and piano (and in Argentina’s more mature works, through the fluid interaction between orchestra and dance company).53
In the beginning stages of her solo career, however, Argentina adhered closely to the flamenco vocabulary’s basic features: time and meter. The elements used to produce tempo and dynamic change in flamenco were footwork (zapateado), clapping (palmas), singing (cante), guitar arpeggios (toque and rosqueado), and Argentina’s hallmark, the castanets (las castañuelas). These rhythmic accompaniments underlay every musical score and choreographic composition created from the moment she began original solo compositions in 1910 until her death in 1936.
The Gypsies of southern Spain taught Argentina how to reproduce time, how to multiply and fracture it so as to compose new tempi, new rhythms. Through multitudes of polyrhythmic formats, Argentina learned to engage an audience. The Gypsies’ clapping, snapping, and footwork taught her how to extract rhythm from rhythm, how to create and to use music as a dramatic character, thus producing the story of itself, a tale about music.54 Time for the Gypsies, then, as transmitted to Argentina, was and remains an abstraction, one so powerful it represents life. By 1910, Argentina, like Falla, was to incorporate the flamenco verse (copla) and the flamenco rhythm (compás) into the turns, kicks, and jumps of the escuela bolera, thus forging an intensely dramatic connection between poetry, music, and dance.
Thus, in Argentina’s fusion of Gypsy flamenco with Spanish dance, rhythm spoke narrative, as well as accompaniment. It was a means of telling the story, providing variations on that story through contratiempi. The castanets clicked as the arms formed circles in the air, accompanied by the drilling of the flamenco shoes on the floor. An intertwining of body, producing rhythm with drama, thus unfolded.
The role played by the voice—the cantaora, as the singer is known in flamenco-provided, perhaps, the most important musical line. Throughout her career, Argentina never forgot the cante, choosing Ninon Vallin, Marguerite Beriza, María Barrientos, Alicita Felici, and many other great women singers, to accompany her on stage, together with guitar, piano, and, at times, a fifty-member orchestra.
As an American critic noted in 1916, Argentina