Antonia Mercé, stage-named La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Her intensive musical and theatrical collaborations with members of the Spanish vanguard — Manuel de Falla, Frederico García Lorca, Enrique Granados, Néstor de la Torre, Joaquín Nín, and with renowned Andalusian Gypsy dancers — reflect her importance as an artistic symbol for contemporary Spain and its cultural history. When she died in 1936, newspapers around the world mourned the passing of the "Flamenco Pavlova."
Antonia Mercé, stage-named La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Her intensive musical and theatrical collaborations with members of the Spanish vanguard — Manuel de Falla, Frederico García Lorca, Enrique Granados, Néstor de la Torre, Joaquín Nín, and with renowned Andalusian Gypsy dancers — reflect her importance as an artistic symbol for contemporary Spain and its cultural history. When she died in 1936, newspapers around the world mourned the passing of the "Flamenco Pavlova."
Antonia Mercé, "LaArgentina": Flamenco and the Spanish Avant Garde
282
Antonia Mercé, "LaArgentina": Flamenco and the Spanish Avant Garde
282eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Antonia Mercé, stage-named La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Her intensive musical and theatrical collaborations with members of the Spanish vanguard — Manuel de Falla, Frederico García Lorca, Enrique Granados, Néstor de la Torre, Joaquín Nín, and with renowned Andalusian Gypsy dancers — reflect her importance as an artistic symbol for contemporary Spain and its cultural history. When she died in 1936, newspapers around the world mourned the passing of the "Flamenco Pavlova."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819575579 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 282 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
NINOTCKA DEVORAH BENNAHUM, choreographer, cultural historian, and native of New Mexico, is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Performance Studies and Theater at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus. In 1986, she received her doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In 1991, she founded The Route 66 Dance Company to bring flamenco, modern, and ballet dancers and musicians together. She is contributing editor for Dance Magazine. She writes on ballet and flamenco dance for The Village Voice, the New York Times, the Albuquerque Journal, and elsewhere and teaches dance history for American Ballet Theater's summer intensive program for pre-professional dancers in New York City. She lives in SoHo, New York.
Ninotchka Bennahum, choreographer, cultural historian, and native of New Mexico, is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Performance Studies and Theater at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus. In 1986, she received her doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In 1991, she founded The Route 66 Dance Company to bring flamenco, modern, and ballet dancers and musicians together. She is contributing editor for Dance Magazine. She writes on ballet and flamenco dance for The Village Voice, the New York Times, the Albuquerque Journal, and elsewhere and teaches dance history for American Ballet Theater's summer intensive program for pre-professional dancers in New York City. Her books include, Antonio Merce, 'La Argentina': Flamenco&the Spanish Avant-Garde and Carmen, A Gypsy Geography. She lives in SoHo, New York.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Argentina and Spanish Modernism
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, Argentina was the only female member of Madrid's avant-garde to dance. In 1890, at the age of two, she was taken to Spain by her parents, dancers on tour. Her mother was a première danseuse at Madrid's Teatro Real, and her father was its principal ballet master. She was trained by him from age four, joined the company at age nine, and was appointed première danseuse at age eleven. In 1910, after a long trip through southern Spain with her mother, where Argentina began to study flamenco dance and Gypsy life with Sevillian Gypsy women, Argentina went to live in France where she would make her home, her career, and her life. Argentina's modernism was shaped by three colossal forces: Paris and its avant-garde art world, Spain's Gypsy past, and European Romantic neoprimitivism.
Paris in 1910 was the center of the modern art world with a European and American émigré population of artists. Georges Clemenceau, president of France, commented that the future rests always with the avant-garde. The cubist legacy of Paul Cézanne and the coloristic ideas of Henri Matisse had radicalized young artists of all genres into believing that the old-fashioned academy no longer held the answer — the formula — to making "good" art; high art. One could actually be self-taught, and young artists, like Salvador Dalí, were discovering that their own personal ideas — highly influenced by Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious mind in the dream state — could provide the modus operandi and inspiration for an entire painting, or an entire ballet.
From Paris and from her world tours, Argentina's lifelong correspondence with the Spanish vanguard — Manuel de Falla, Federico Garcia Lorca, Enrique Granados, Néstor de la Torre, Joaquín Nín, and Gregorio Martínez Sierra and María Sierra — establishes her importance to modernist Spanish art, both in Paris and worldwide, from the second decade of the twentieth century until her death on 18 July 1936. Alongside and in collaboration with such outstanding artists, Argentina also transformed the Spanish arts of the period. Her collaborations with numerous Spanish composers, painters, writers, and poets secure her importance as an artistic force in Spanish cultural history.
Argentina's career coincided with a particularly volatile moment in Spain's history. With radical syndicalism and incipient revolution on the horizon, women were politically restrained by Spanish law and social mores, limited in movement, and in their right to express themselves as they desired. Paris, by comparison, was a serene city in which to work, more liberating for a woman living and working alone, and Argentina found a home there in 1921. It was in Paris that Gertrude Stein and her brothers Leo and Michael would provide a salon and showcase for Matisse, Picasso, and many other modernists, mainly Spanish and French, who were also interested in theatrical design. Although industrially polluted and heavily populated, Paris was a beautiful city that provided a certain anonymity. And, by virtue of its artists, its exiled and émigré populations from World War I, its café culture, its theatrical traditions, and its audiences, it was appealing to a young artist seeking a place in which to realize herself.
Flamenco as Modern Art
For Spaniards, flocking from the conservative and Catholic atmosphere of turnof-the-century Madrid, Paris became a haven for the exploration of their radical ideas. In Paris, their dismissal of historical portraiture and their adoption of an austerely Spanish cubism would speak not only of and to Spaniards, but become, in the hands of a Picasso or an Argentina, a universal language of modern art. Who best to describe the Spanish aesthetic credo but its greatest supporter, the American aesthetician Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris and encouraged the latest trends in the arts?
Stein believed that the "new" art of composition that was created in Paris arose solely from the exodus of Spanish artists — Julio Gonzalez, Picasso's teacher, Pablo Picasso, Juan Grís, and Joan Miró — to France in the early twentieth century. For Stein, the "instinctive tragedy" and the stark compositions of synthetic cubists like Picasso and Grís was a Spanish phenomenon. "Americans can understand Spaniards," wrote Stein in her autobiography of 1925. And "cubism" as created and executed by Spaniards "is a purely Spanish conception; only Spaniards can be cubists." That commentary may be a bit limited, but as the main supporter and collector of early cubist work, Stein was relating not only to the "insistent iconography" — the object as subject — of a painting, but also to the primary feeling of the composition. Stein once referred to Picasso's "passion and sexuality, directed wholly toward his painting." By this, she meant his Spanish persona and his Spanish-informed genius. Further, the words "insistent" and "passionate" also reveal a violent and angry temperament — the Spanish persona about which Stein wrote. A parallel will be drawn between the intensity of Picasso's brushstrokes and the fury associated with flamenco footwork as choreographed and performed by La Argentina in her most mature works of cubist design.
When Argentina came to dance on the French stage; she could not help being influenced by Picasso and his fellow cubist, Georges Braque. At the 1925 Spanish Pavilion for the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, where she danced, she was bound to have encountered Juan Grís, a fellow Madrileño whose painting The Green Cloth hung in the Nouveau pavilion. Indeed, this very pavilion was designed by Le Corbusier, an architect whose work might have reminded her of the Catalonian structures built by Antonio Gaudi (1852–1926). Argentina would become what Stein felt Grís was: "A Spaniard who combines perfection with transubstantiation," a painter whose "very great attraction and love for French culture" made him a compelling artist.
Although Argentina missed the 1905, 1907, and 1909 Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne, she was most likely captivated by Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), his still lifes with guitars (1907–14), and Grís's Flowers (1914). She was a discriminating woman, a woman of taste, who saw everything, inhaled everything, and then used what she liked as material for her own work. Inspired by both French and Spanish design, as she was by Diaghilev's, Nijinsky's, and Massine's theater, Argentina broke with traditional Spanish ballet. Although she was the soloist, she was no longer always at the center of the composition: at times, her set designer's looming scenery would be tipping toward the stage, absorbing the dancer's violent footwork just as Picasso's decomposed compositions flattened his figures through violent brush strokes, removing hieratic and hierarchic significance from the composition and imposing a more evenly distributed (or disruptive) sense of disproportion, disunity, and disorganization. Second, these Spanish cubists' break with what Stein called "the evil nineteenth century" breathed a neoprimitivist aesthetic. For example, Picasso's use of a pre-Roman Iberian mask for his portrait of Gertrude Stein and his use of Yoruba masks for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, although a cultural theft on his part, might well have provided Argentina with the idea of looking into Gypsy culture, an oriental culture that lived in hiding within Spain itself.
Just as Picasso would use the Iberian mask for Stein's face to re-invent his subject, objectifying her so that he could capture her colossal will and extraordinary single-mindedness, Argentina would use Gypsy rhythm as the sole signifier and accompaniment, the principal choreographic and musical agent throughout an entire ballet (for example, La vida breve). The idea of rhythm for Argentina — and for the Gypsies — like the unspecific look of the mask for Picasso, allowed the aesthetic of the ballet to become more important than the dancing bodies themselves. As Argentina's choreography and taste for scenic design improved and matured, the semiotics of her late ballets like Sonatina and El contrabandista not only subsumed the composition; they became its genesis. Just as Picasso used — and stole — the African mask from its original context, translating its masklike exterior into a new formal vocabulary which he then reconfigured, out of Argentina's use of the flamenco rhythm, accompanied by Manuel de Falla's use of ancient Jewish liturgical chant, the saeta antigua, would emerge a modern, cubist composition in which bodies were no longer bodies but the objects of sound.
Like Picasso, Argentina began to draw on the decorative aspects of Gypsy and Spanish peasant culture, exploring color and design motifs and using 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. 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'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. 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."
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.
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 3/4time seguidillas manchegas before that). 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. 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."
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. 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. It was part of an effort to resuscitate the legacy of flamenco music and song.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Antonia Merce, "La Argentina""
by .
Copyright © 2000 Ninotchka Bennahum.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
A Note on Sources
Argentina and Spanish Modernism
The Formative Years (1888-1912)
Giving Grace a Body: From the Music Hall to the Concert Stage (1912-1923)
The Modernism of El amor brujo
A Feminist Folklore: Argentina and the Women of Spain (1910-1936)
Nationalism and Cubism: El fandango del candil and Triana
An Unwritten Legacy
Chronology
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
What People are Saying About This
"La Argentina is without doubt the most influential Spanish dance artist of this, or any other, century. This is the first serious attempt to evaluate her contribution not only in the strictly dance field, but in the wider context of Spanish culture and the artistic movements of this century. It will be of great value to music and dance historians for its account of La Argentina's long collaboration with Manuel de Falla and its vivid descriptions of some of her important choreographic work, which is all the more valuable in the absence of any notated record."—Ivor Guest, author of The Ballet of the Enlightenment
"La Argentina is without doubt the most influential Spanish dance artist of this, or any other, century. This is the first serious attempt to evaluate her contribution not only in the strictly dance field, but in the wider context of Spanish culture and the artistic movements of this century. It will be of great value to music and dance historians for its account of La Argentina's long collaboration with Manuel de Falla and its vivid descriptions of some of her important choreographic work, which is all the more valuable in the absence of any notated record."