them as theatrical through-lines. Argentina’s interest in the local as an expression of a homogeneous, self-contained people became the onstage cuadro, or group, a reflection of the isolated Gypsy clans.5 For Argentina, the Gypsies’ utterly private, tribal existence provided a utopia, the perfect ethnographic laboratory. The artist, she felt, could discover the essential “tools” of her movement language in her own land; in the authentic, unobtrusive, objective voice of Andalusian culture. It was for her a completely subjective universe of song and dance that could be modified and recomposed through the body of a part Andalusian, part Castilian performer. It was, finally, a Romantic vision of Spain transfigured into modern artistic expression.
Argentina in a solo performance of La Corrida, at London’s Aldwych Theatre, 15 June 1936.
Argentina’s productions that were collaborations offered modernist visions of a multinational Spain. Her ballets Triana and Juerga, for example, embraced both Andalusian Gypsy and Spanish folk culture.6 Her professional relationship with the Spanish modernist composer Manuel de Falla, especially, became the catalyst for two other lyric dance-dramas, both prime examples of her modernism: El amor brujo and La vida breve. The New York Times critic John Martin wrote that both works demonstrated her ability “to capture the aliveness of the Spanish body and hold it in the bounds of form.”7
In 1925, she created the full-length story-ballet around the old Andalusian Gypsy legend “El amor brujo” (Love, the sorcerer). For it, she developed new dimensions for mise-en-scène using Spanish themes, as she reworked Spanish dance. She took the Spanish classical dance technique and, experimenting with Gypsy flamenco rhythms and stories, realized a new and succinct dance vocabulary that became a performed national language for the next decade on the stages of Europe and the Americas. Her fusion of Gypsy and Spanish classical traditions became the basis of her working vocabulary, one she used to train her company of dancers, who themselves were fine flamenco artists, often of Gypsy ancestry. Argentina produced the first modernist dance-dramas created by a Spanish choreographer. Working only with Spanish collaborators, Argentina had developed an art form that was genuinely national. She had rediscovered the narrative potential of Spanish movements and music and made them symbolic of Spain’s complex history, recognizing its peoples, cultures, and physiognomy.
Scene 1 from the ballet Juerga, 10 June 1929, full company, music by Julian Bautista, sets and costumes by Fontanals, premiered at the Théâtre Marigny.
La Escuela Bolera
Argentina believed that the tradition in which she had first been trained must form the basis—the model—for her vision. Argentina’s aim was to create a new form of narrative and wholly Spanish dance-theater, fully orchestrated and costumed for the proscenium stage. Her “uniqueness,” as the French author Anatole France described her meticulous approach to Spanish dance, was academically classical in its use of ballet-inspired boleros and jotas—dances of the Teatro Real de Madrid. Argentina’s early repertory, from 1910 to 1915, drew significantly upon the bolero tradition. The bolero—as a dance and a genre based on a combination of indigenous Spanish dances by eighteenth-century dance masters—was used as both a choreographic tool and a dance style. Argentina, however, used the bolero as a solo and not as the couple dance that had been modified in the mid-eighteenth century from the seguidilla bolera (and from the 3/4-time seguidillas manchegas before that).8 It allowed her to demonstrate extremely technical, classical technique, while accompanying herself with castanets and quick changes of direction.
In using the step and the style of the escuela bolera, Argentina paid tribute to the artistry of her parents, especially her father, while developing a modern sensibility on an old-fashioned form. The escuela bolera was a synthesis of early nineteenth-century bolero, other Spanish dances, and elements of French ballet that came together in Seville during the Napoleonic era.9 Argentina changed the bolero through the incorporation of Gypsy flamenco footwork and armwork. Together, light bolero jumps and turns combined with earth-centered Gypsy dance traveled a dual-national but Spanish dance from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. In its newly transfigured form (1925–36), Argentina’s vision of the bolero would become a reinvented Spanish tradition that could survive both the modernist artists’ abhorrence of the past (that is, the ephemeral qualities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism) and the cubo-futurists’ embrace of twentieth-century mechanization (that is, linearity, angularity, and the aesthetic of the ugly). Instead of allowing the sylph to disappear entirely from the stage—turned into an earth-driven Gypsy flamenca—Argentina, in combining the bolero and the bulerías (Andalusian song and dance), folded a more ethereal vision of dama, perhaps preindustrial, into the cosmopolitan working woman.
Nevertheless, Argentina’s dance was also motivated by an ethnographic interest in Spain, her adopted homeland; this interest took the form of an assiduous exploration of the dances of Castile, Aragón, Navarre, Valencia, Galicia, and Andalusia. Her multiethnic vision of Spanish ballet was recognized by the Russo-French critic André Levinson as early as 1923. Levinson’s critiques of her Parisian performances, as well as his 1928 monograph on the artist, helped launch her to fame. In this later work, Levinson explained her transformation of the Spanish dance: “Argentina,” he said, “was transposing the themes of Spanish folklore, the native dances which are the first rude stammer of primitive instinct, into style. She understood perfectly the two-fold nature of that dance—scene and spirit—that makes it so fascinating. Thanks to her, Spanish dancing has now entered a new phase and risen to hitherto unattained heights of sublimation.”10
Argentina on tour in Holland, 3 April 1935, press conference.
La Prima Modernista
Argentina had first achieved broad recognition as a soloist in 1916, touring Spain, North and South America, and northern Europe with her guitarist and family friend Salvador Ballesteros and her pianist, Carmencita Pérez. By 1923, Argentina’s name was uttered in the same breath as that of the great French tragedienne Sarah Bernhardt, the American dancers Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller, the Spanish film and stage actress Raquel Meller, and the Spanish “art” dancer Tórtola Valencia. In the company of these women, Argentina performed in Paris, Moscow, New York, London, Madrid, Seville, Tunis, Tokyo, Shanghai, The Hague, and Mexico City. She would return to her birthplace only on short tours.
Like Tórtola Valencia and many other female soloists of the 1920s, Argentina also incorporated an exotic approach to the Spanish dance, juxtaposing the escuela bolera, the bolero school, which had its origins in ballet, with flamenco puro, or pure flamenco. In order to realize this, Argentina became an ethnographer, traveling Spain’s forty-nine provinces with her pianist, who would transpose local melodies to be used later in full orchestral compositions. Argentina went in search of regional sounds, colors, and stories, which she used to people her ballets, clothe her characters, and decorate her scenes. In doing so, she brought to the stage her vision of the immensely varied Spanish dance. She breathed life into centuries-old Gypsy dances, while paying close attention to the rituals and customs found in Gypsy culture.11 Argentina’s interest in authentic sources paralleled that of the Russian-born Ballets Russes choreographer Michel Fokine, and it anticipated the 1922 Concurso de cante jondo—a “deep song” singing competition organized by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and poet Federico Garcia Lorca.12 It was part of an effort to resuscitate the legacy of flamenco music and song.
Argentina in a solo performance of Tango Andalou, music by Ballesteros, at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music, 3 June 1935.
For