Antonia Mercé, "LaArgentina": Flamenco and the Spanish Avant Garde

By Ninotchka Bennahum

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."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Aug 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9780819575579

Ninotchka Bennahum

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.

Book preview

ANTONIA MERCÉ

Argentina posing in Paris for photographer Madame d’Ora, 1928.

LA ARGENTINA

Flamenco and the Spanish Avant Garde

Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum

Wesleyan University Press

PUBLISHED BY UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND HANOVER AND LONDON

Wesleyan University Press

Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755

© 2000 by Ninotchka Bennahum

All rights reserved

5 4 3 2 1

CIP data appear at the end of the book

The publisher and author gratefully acknowledge the support of the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Education and Culture and the United States’ Universities in the publication of this book, and thank the Spanish Ministry of Culture for the iconographic material used in the color section.

Argentina in Tango Andalou.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Color plates follow pages 44 and 140

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began as a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and is here offered in an expanded and revised version. I would like to thank the following people, without whom this book would have been impossible: Suzanna Tamminen, editor-in-chief of Wesleyan University Press, who heard me speak at the Performance Studies Conference at Northwestern University in 1996 and urged me to publish; Carlota Mercé de Pavloff, who, after many hours together, told me Now it’s up to you to pass on my Aunt’s legacy and entrusted me with dozens of photographs of Argentina’s rich career; Ivor Guest and Selma-Jeanne Cohen, who read and corrected the manuscript, offering structural and historical advice; and the staff of the University Press of New England, who saw the book through production. I would also like to thank my wonderful doctoral advisors, Professor Brooks McNamara and Dr. Lynn Garafola, for their advice, patience, and counsel. I would also like to thank the following institutions and libraries without whom the research and writing of this book would have been impossible: Señor Gascon, Director of the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and the Americas; the Spanish Ministry of Culture; Dean Emeritus Gilmore Stott, Chair of the Lucretia Mott Fellowship for Women in the Humanities Committee; Romain Feist, conservateur, and the wonderful staff at the Paris Opera’s National Academy of Music and Dance; the Bibliothèque Nationale de Richelieu and Simone Drouain, Bibliothèque Nationale de l’Arsenal; The Hispanic Society, New York City; Constance Old, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Nicolas, Cinémathèque de la Danse; Roger Viollet photographic archives, Paris; Antonio Gallego and his staff at the Juan March Fundación, Madrid; Rosario Sanchez at the Conde Duque archives of the city of Madrid; the Fundación Andaluza de Flamenco, Jerez; the Biblioteca Nacionale, Jerez; Juan de la Plata, Catedra de Flamencología, Jerez; Elena and Ana Paredes and Jorge de Persia at the Manuel de Falla archives in Madrid and Granada; Miguel Alonso Lopez and the Teatro Español, Madrid; the Teatro Real de Madrid; the Biblioteca Nacionale, Madrid; Monique Paravicini, president, Les Amis de l’Argentina, Monaco and Paris; Mariemma, past director of the National Academy of Dance, Madrid; Lola Greco, ex-principal soloist with Ballet National de Español; Madeline Nichols, Monica Moseley, and the staff at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dance Collection; and the Library of Congress. Further, I gratefully acknowledge the ceaseless and tireless work of my British translator, Joan Taylor, who sat with me in the Paris Opera, poring over the correspondence of the Spanish vanguard’s composers, librettists, and scene designers.

I would like to thank the following editors, mentors, friends, and family members whose counsel and support during the writing of my dissertation was indispensable: 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 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.

A young Argentina posing in Spanish dress, 1920s, Paris.

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.¹

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 turn-of-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.² 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.³ 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.⁴

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.

Argentina and Les Ballets Espagnols in Scene 1 from Triana, Opéra-Comique, 27 May 1929.

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.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