Antonia Mercé, "LaArgentina". Ninotchka Bennahum

they were reincorporated has yet to be studied. Further, one must ask whether Flamenco performers’ prejudice against the Spanish castanet was a Franco-era holdover or a postmodern reaction to a light-sounding, aristocratic instrument that viewed the castanet as a conflation of eighteenth- and twentieth-century socioeconomic and political values.

      For his daughter, learning them was a lesson in concentration, discipline, control, and musical perception. Further, if played with authority and dignity, the castanets could awaken patriotism and delight in most Spanish audiences, bestowing upon the performer immediate and laudatory acceptance as a high artist in the Spanish tradition of theatrical performance. It was, therefore, no surprise that castanets were featured in Argentina’s first solo performance outside the Teatro Real, which took place in 1905 on the concert stage of the Romea Theater. There, “on a splintering floor,” Argentina sang, danced boleros, and played the castanets in public for the first time.²⁹

      In a 1932 London interview, Argentina recalled her first reaction to these small, unassuming hand instruments:

      When I was little, barely five, I constantly heard castanets in my parents’ house, as they taught dance lessons. This anti-musical sound irritated me to the point where I hid in the farthest room of the house to escape its echo. There I practiced my girlish fingers on a pair of little castanets that my father had given me. I was forcing myself unconsciously (since, at that age, one doesn’t reason) to get sounds out of that instrument, sounds that would not hurt my ears like the others. Those were my beginnings in the art I now practice, and I can very well say that the liking I took to my castanets followed my dislike of the castanets of others.³⁰

      It was not until she left the Teatro Real that she took a real interest in what it meant to play castanets. After several years of training herself, however, Argentina became a maestra. She recalled that “I ordered castanets to be made with a variety of different degrees of concavity.³¹ The castanet-maker was furious, saying that I was trying to tell him how to do his job. My response was that, in return for his work, I could sell the whole world castanets that he was already making; but for my own use, I needed the others.”³² As Vicente Escudero recalled so poignantly in his memoirs, Mi baile, Argentina became not only a great castanet-player, but a connoisseur of the instrument itself. “I believe the secret was in the artist herself,” he said, “and she has taken it with her to heaven, because up to this point, no one has managed to reproduce it, and no one ever will. Although she was the creator of the school of playing that everyone cultivates today, they all lack the genius of the master.”³³

      By the age of seventeen, however, as she toured Spain and South America as a solo concert artist, when Argentina was asked about her castanet-playing, she became almost dismissive: “That’s not worth talking about,” she exclaimed. Castanet-playing “is not something one learns; it comes from far away.”³⁴

      Also at the age of four, Argentina began to dance, having watched her father’s nightly classes from behind a curtain in the living room.³⁵ She remembered: “As my parents refused to teach me to dance, I learned by attending the courses they were giving.”³⁶ Imitating the classical tutorials of her father, Argentina learned to dance by practicing the Spanish classics: the cachucha, as well as the jota of Aragón, the hundreds of dances from the Basque provinces and Navarre, and the valenciana from Valencia.³⁷ In 1893, at five years of age, Argentina found herself dancing a lead part in one of her father’s ballets in Córdoba, as the original dancer had been injured. Argentina begged her father to let her play the role. At first, he declined. So she danced it for him, having seen the original star execute the movements. Argentina made no mistakes. The maestro was desperate, as this was a performance for royalty, and at last he agreed. Argentina not only completed the dance without faltering, but did so with such clarity and fluidity that she received enormous applause. Although her father remained, until he died, opposed to his daughter dancing, he could not but tell her she had danced well and had understood the rules of the Spanish dance without lessons.

      

      Argentina with the castanet maestra Orfilia Rico, taking a tutorial, 1915.

      It was after her enormous success in a popular zarzuela, The Nephews of Captain Grant (1894), however, that Manoël began coaching his daughter.³⁸ Only seven years old at the time, Argentina executed the difficult dance of the zamacueca, once again replacing the premier sujet, who was taken ill suddenly during the company’s tour. Small and thin at the time, Argentina danced the zamacueca with “grace and elegance,” adding to the dance number a special personality.³⁹ At the turn of the century, zarzuelas were Spanish operettas based mostly on satirical themes.⁴⁰ Spoken dialogue and sung text carried the story alongside large dance scenes. Within the popular zarzuela comic musical, one could attain fame among a large section of the Spanish population. Immensely popular until the Second World War, they allowed celebrated performers the chance to appear before a large audience. The early twentieth-century Spanish popularity for the zarzuela theater prepared Argentina for the music halls she played in Paris. She had acquired a taste for variety acts, getting used to performing on the same program with a film, a dog, an acrobat, a singer, as well as to condensing her solo if time was short.⁴¹

      

      Argentina’s hands.

      Merce now placed his daughter at the barre in the living room, teaching her the fundamentals of the Spanish technique.⁴² Between 1899 and 1903 she began seriously studying music and dance at the conservatory. At the end of 1903, her father had a stroke and was left paralyzed, unable to dance, teach, or even to walk. His wife took over his evening classes and, in December, when he died, Argentina began to help her in order to pay the household bills.⁴³ Her mother also supplemented her father’s lessons by tutoring her in music. By 1904, Argentina had succeeded in passing all the dance examinations while purposely flunking the examinations in music, except for castanet-playing.⁴⁴

      With Mercé’s death, the fifteen-year-old Argentina took her fate into her own hands. She would sever her ties to academic Spanish dance, devoting her life to its origins. “My parents only knew classical Spanish dance, in the tradition of the escuela bolera…. Flamenco and folk-dancing were unknown to them. I read all I could find out about it; I ransacked secondhand bookstores, now and then finding engravings.”⁴⁵ Argentina began to develop an insatiable appetite for ethnographic accuracy and her desire to methodically study dance forms would follow her throughout her career.

      Argentina’s early repertory (1910–15), significantly drew upon the bolero tradition. She used the bolero both as a choreographic tool and as a dance style incorporated into an extensive and evolving movement vocabulary. Argentina used the bolero as a solo and not as a couple dance. It allowed her to demonstrate both extremely technical, classical technique while accompanying herself with castanets and quick changes of direction. In using the step and the style of the bolero school, Argentina paid tribute to the artistry of her parents while developing a modern sensibility on an old-fashioned form. She juxtaposed it and changed the actual Spanish dance in relation to Gypsy flamenco footwork and armwork. Together, the light bolero jumps and turns, combined with the earth-centered Gypsy dance, created a dual-national Spanish dance from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

      For Argentina, the bolero could only work on the modern stage in conjunction with flamenco. Flamenco’s technique of florea and braceo, the intricate and sinuous carving of space with shoulders, hips, hands, head, and feet, were executed in conjunction with Spanish classical bolero steps. Through the insistent rhythms and articulation of hands and feet, Argentina would incorporate flamenco into a total physical expression of the Spanish dance. For Argentina, then, the airy, ephemeral technique of eighteenth-century Spanish dance, combined with the mechanized, razor-sharp edge of twentieth-century flamenco interpretation helped her to build a bridge between Romantic visions of an ethereal woman and modernists’ attraction to seemingly architectonic bodies—speedy