Richard Philp, editor-in-chief, Dance Magazine; Robert Johnson; Paul Ben-Itzhak; Annette Grant, arts and leisure editor of the New York Times; Elizabeth Zimmer, senior editor, the Village Voice; my friend and inspiration Dr. Constance Valis-Hill; Martha Goldstein; Matteo; María Benitez; Nancy Zeckendorf; the late Vicente Granados; Mario Maya; Eva Enciñas-Sandoval and Joaquín Enciñas; La Conja and Pedro Cortes; Christine Spizzo and Raymond Serrano; Lynn Fenwick, American Ballet Theatre educational coordinator; Rebecca Wright; the late Cynthia Novack, Deborah Jowitt, Mark Franko, Marcia Siegel, Peggy Phelan, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, and Richard Schechner; Dr. Dwight Conquergood, Northwestern University; Dr. Kaori Kitao, my friend and mentor who taught me to see; Professor Sharon Friedler, Swarthmore College; Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell, Dean Tisch; Camille Hardy; Joseph Machlis, professor of music at the Juilliard School; Jo Anna Parmalee and María Bermudez, Jerez de la Frontera; Maríja Temo; Joan Erdman; Eric and Daria Foner; Jan Rosenberg; Marla del Collins, Gail-Ann Greaves, John Sannuto, Stuart Fishelson, Dev Mondale, Luz Martín del Campo, Yuko Minowa, José Sanchez; Barbara Parisi; Carole Walker and Stefano Natella; Steven Salovitch; Steven Rosenthal; Seth Lemler; the members of Ballet Museum Club, Ellen Crane, Jane Potter, and Sophia Fatoures; Kim Arrow and Sally Hess; Ze’eva Cohen, Princeton University; Bob Ackerman, Nancy Heller, and Susan Glazer, The University of the Arts; Linda Haviland-Caruso, Bryn Mawr College; Larry Lavander; Barbara Barker; Iro Valaskakis-Tembeck; Shelley Berg; Sally Banes; Madame Brigitte Ortiz; George Dorris; Elizabeth Aldrich; Tommy de Frantz; Sumitra Mukherji; Lutyz de Luz; Nina, Tamara, and Elisso Tarassachvili; Edward Tellos, Tower Records; Eléanore Schoëffer; Lélie and Maurice Kurtz; Jacqueline Harding; Jérôme Schmeitsky for walking me around Paris after exhausting, research-filled days; Maxine Pines, my cousin; Judith Berke, poet; James Lack; Wendy Abrams; Dolores Chafik; Judy Senouf; choreographer and friend Mariko Tanabe; Spanish guitarist Marija Temo; Gypsy guitarist Chuscales; Claude Fouillade; Josh Berger, who always lets me stay at his house in Madrid; Penny and Pedro Ferreira; the late Alan Haskel; Roz and Bill Gerschell; Joyce Haskel; Lucy Hayden and Joetta Jercinovic for teaching me to dance; Jennifer Predock-Linnell and Jim Linnell, friends, mentors, and inspirations; my friend and physical therapist Gayanne Grossman; Dr. John Graham; the late Dr. Bob Kellner; Dr. Allen Adolphe; Joan Duddy of Joyce SoHo administrative staff, who believes in experiments in Spanish-flamenco choreography; friends and beautiful dancers Carmen Smith, Sara Baird, Dante Puleio, Rob Hayden, Heidi Latsky, and Jan Leys, who helped me to explore flamenco through my dance company, The Route 66 Dance Company; Suki John; writer Douglas Cooper; Molly Savitz; Neil Morley; Michaela and Schlomo Kami; Malka and Elyana Sutin; David and Sheila Conine-Johnson; Roselyne Chenu; my Feminist muse; my cousin David S. Bennahum; my great aunt Stella Fishbach; my best friend musician/lawyer David Thornquist; and all of my students.
I am especially grateful to have been born into an awesome family and thank them here for their love and unwavering support: my mother, Dr. Judith Chazin-Bennahum, my father, Dr. David Alexander Bennahum, my creative writer sister, Rachel, and my brilliant brother, Aaron, ballet dancer and educator.
SoHo, New York City June 1999
A NOTE ON SOURCES
In examining the life and times of La Argentina, I shall concentrate on her role as a modernist. I shall show the variegated character of the nationalist theme as it emerged in her consciousness, her choreography, and her theatrical productions, as well as the many forms of “Spanishness” and the many different Spains that she embodied. Like Maya Deren, Argentina was an assiduous ethnographer, combing Spain for rhythms, materials, and design concepts. She deserves to be recognized for her invaluable contribution to theater and to the evolution of twentieth-century Spanish culture before the rise of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Indeed, in her vision of Spanish nationality, with its emphasis on multiethnicity and heterogeneity, we find the antithesis of Franco’s fascist monolith.
No comprehensive study of the work of Antonia Mercé, “La Argentina,” exists. No writer has yet to consider Argentina as a force in Spanish modernist theatrical production; no one has yet seen her as the muse of both the Spanish vanguard and the French art press. This volume offers an artistic biography of the dancer, describes the times in which she developed her aesthetic, and analyzes the social and artistic events that influenced her work.
Several biographies have been written. Suzanne Cordelier’s 1936 biography in French, La Vie Brève de L’Argentina, is a subjective glorification of the artist, who was a personal friend. Gilberte Cournand’s Argentina (1956) provides an annotated dictionary of her dances and contains accompanying photographs taken by her patron, Monique Paravicini; this brief work is descriptive, but it omits any critical analysis of the ballets. More recent biographies, such as Suzanne de Soye’s Toi qui dansais, Argentina (1993), which has been translated into English, travel through Argentina’s life, focusing on important performances, works, and personal events. Like Cournand’s work, however, de Soye’s lacks critical insight into Argentina’s work. Neither book takes into account the political, economic, and social concerns of the day or the importance of Argentina’s presence in French and Spanish cultural history. The most important work on Argentina, La Argentina Fue Antonia Mercé (1993), written in Spanish by the Argentinian dance historian Carlos Manso, presents a complete picture of Argentina’s work at the Teatro Colón and her close artistic relationship with ballet dancer Maria Ruanova in Buenos Aires, who supplied Manso with a wealth of information. Manso, however, does not focus his study on the whole of Argentina’s career; he merely contextualizes her importance within her country of birth, making her an Argentinian cultural icon.
It is in the light of larger aesthetic, social, and historical concerns that I choose to present Argentina. As an artistic study of one woman and the fascinating interwar period during which she developed her vision of a Spanish theater, this volume both describes her dances, performances, and critical reviews and defines her importance as a Spaniard within Europe.
I have drawn on primary sources that trace Argentina’s career from her appointment as première danseuse of the Teatro Real de Madrid in 1899 to her premature death in 1936. The French, Spanish, British, and American press followed her career closely from 1910 onward and served as both an archive and artistic critique. The press coverage also allowed for a partial reconstruction of her most important ballets: El amor brujo (1925), Triana (1927), El contrabandista (1928), Juerga (1927), Goyescas (1930), La corrida (1919), and Seguidillas (1924). Particular attention could, therefore, be paid to understanding the sequence, design, and choreography of her ballets and the Spanish collaborators who helped to realize them.
Press materials on La Argentina were many.1 Iconographic sources—paintings, notes on scores, drawings, photographs, and two films—form a second group of important source materials. Interviews and correspondence between myself and Argentina’s family and patrons represent a third group of sources. A fourth group includes the histories that help elucidate her dance within its musical, literary, and political context. Novels and cultural histories of the period in question have proved helpful in formulating the sociocultural background. For that, I have consulted the literature of women in history, in particular Gerda Lerner’s social histories, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), as well as works on feminist aesthetics. All cast theoretical light on Argentina, on her importance in her own time, and in ours.
Argentina influenced French symbolist, surrealist, dadaist, and cubist novelists, poets, and visual artists. Thus, I have also consulted Spanish and French cultural, political, and literary histories that cover the years from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War, in search of historical fact and social background. Art-historical theory, history, and criticism was used to interpret Spanish modernism, nationalism, and feminism.
| ANTONIA MERGÉ, “LA ARGENTINA” |
| ARGENTINA AND SPANISH MODERNISM | 1 |
Antonia Rosa Mercé y Luque (1888–1936), or “La Argentina, as she was generally known, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early twentieth century. Adopting as her professional name the country of her birth,