Antonia Mercé, "LaArgentina". Ninotchka Bennahum

exceptional perfection … in the liveliness of her dances… she executes delicately, and not by way of vigor or simple muscular control. She is also a virtuosa in the playing of the castanets, in which she has never been outdone.”⁵⁵ Argentina would begin every ballet she created, conceptually, through a written score executed by Manuel de Falla or one of his students. She then superimposed on each score the rhythms of her feet, head, and hands. Onto those polyrhythms, Argentina added those of her company. With this massive musical resonance in mind, she began to choreograph. This intensive focus on rhythm she learned from the Gypsies and from observing her father beat out rhythms with a cane (known in Spanish as a palo seco), standing before his private students at night, and from her early musical training at Madrid’s Conservatory.

      

      Argentina with Spanish open singer and close friend Maria Barrientos, London, 1931

      At the end of her year’s stay in Barcelona, Argentina formally resigned from the Teatro Real. Although deeply unhappy dancing in a flamenco bar, Argentina chose an even more difficult route, the intensive and private study of flamenco rhythms. Josefa kept the house on Olmo Street, but she had closed it, once again, to accompany her daughter to Seville in early 1904. This trip marked the beginning of her career.

      In her quest for the deepest personal understanding and physical experience of the Spanish dance, Argentina trained all the day in, zapateado, compás, and in an ornate and articulate style of holding the upper torso, head, and arms while the feet drilled out time.⁵⁶ What was not so alien to Argentina was the body carriage of the gitanas flamencas, who held themselves upright, at times swaying arms and hips from side to side, but always with control, agility, and strength. It was, indeed, the carriage of the waist to the head that came naturally to Argentina, as it was not so different from the upper-body carriage required in the escuela bolera.

      Argentina’s formative education in how the female Gypsy carried her upper-body weight and framed her face with bent elbows and wrists was further reinforced by an intensifying awareness of florea (the flowering of the hands and fingers). The arms traced continuous circles, beginning at the shoulder joint, continuing to the elbow joint, and breaking at the wrist so as to leave the fingers free to form endless circles, akin to the Indian mudra.

      In August 1906, Argentina was invited to tour Portugal. The flamenco cuadro was to be directed by the celebrated cantaor Antonio el de Bilbao, with whom she would later share a London booking at the Palace Theater. In 1906, however, it was an engagement at the Casino International de Figueira da Foz, located in Foz, a seaside city several hundred kilometers north of Lisbon. This was Argentina’s first official international tour.

      From Lisbon, Argentina decided to make her way to Paris, where flamenco dancers had toured since the turn of the century. The Parisian craze for Spanish flamenco dance and music had initiated a Spanish vogue so popular that the singing cafés, as well as the music halls and variety theaters, contracted hundreds of Spanish dancers to play the “ethnic” act in any number of variety lineups.

      In the winter of 1907, Argentina debuted on screen as a solo dancer and castanet-player in the lost film El Brillante de Cartagena, and began to be called “La Bella Argentina” by the Spanish press.

      Following her first and only cinematic work (released in 1908) Argentina returned to her base in Madrid, touring the surrounding cities of Oviedo, Lisbon, Valladolid, and Murcia. She premiered on 15 August at Madrid’s Teatro Principe Alfonso and on 15 September at the Salón Madrid. Argentina was now performing so much that her name began to appear frequently in the Spanish press. The publication La tierra cartagenera wrote at the time: “The notable artist of the Spanish dance, ‘the beautiful Argentina,’ appeared last night in this lucky theater, and just as in all the tours she has made here, the ‘queen of the farruca’ [a traditionally male flamenco dance] attained great success.”⁵⁷ On 12 July, Argentina debuted at Madrid’s great salons, the Salón Novelty and Gran Café Teatro de Madrid.

      By 1909, Argentina added every major variety theater in Madrid to her list of performance venues. “La Argentina” had now become associated with the Salón Artístico, the Pabellón Fino, and the Cine Martin, the most famous dance and film variety halls. The Madrid public was now accustomed to reading about her nightly appearances the following day in A.B.C., Nuevo mundo, and La unión.

      Argentina also expanded her Spanish tours to include Andalusia. She performed on the Costa Brava at Malaga’s Salón Moderno, and in Vigo at the Salón Artístico, returning to Madrid to play the famous Royal-Kursaal before embarking once again for France. The Malaguenen daily, La unión mercantil, featured daily reviews of January performances, describing her as “master of the farruca,” as well as “beautiful and handsome in body and voice, with such original grace that she holds no rivals.” The paper went on to point out that “in the Garrotín, she reveals herself as maestra, injecting the Indian origins into her dances, so that we may firmly understand” them.⁵⁸

      Argentina, traveling once again with her mother as chaperone, arrived in Paris at the end of the summer of 1910. She immediately found work in the chorus of the famous café chantant, the Jardin de Paris. By the summer of 1910, after enormous personal success and added flamenco training throughout Spain, Argentina was given a small role in a new Spanish musical. According to the Spanish press, Argentina’s youthful energy communicated her charisma to audiences. Now, she employed not only her classical experience on the opera stage, but her flamenco technique on the tablao stage. Due to a bad Montevidean review that characterized her singing as shrill, and unsonorous, Argentina stopped singing during solo dances, which numbered twenty-six in a single evening by the year 1915. Her performance became, therefore, intensely physical and it is no wonder that Argentina’s attention to decor would help fill the dramatic gap left after she removed vocal accompaniment. Her multiple dance techniques and her added years of castanet-playing were about to launch her to stardom.

      She was hired later in 1910 by Halévy, Jouillot, and Mareil, directors of a variety bill, composed mostly of Valverde compositions. Argentina performed in a short operetta on the bill and was a success. The show was performed at Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montmartre music hall, the Moulin Rouge. Because they had seen Argentina’s 1906 appearance at the Jardin de Paris, the show’s directors decided to give the young performer a small but noticeable part. She danced alongside Antonio el de Bilbao and the celebrated Mojigango.

      Although only one of fifty dancers in the final number, her interpretation of the tauromachic rites enacted in the Moorish arena launched her to fame, and she began to be noticed by the French press. Later on, she was to dance a short solo in the show on a theme composed by Quiñito Valverde, a popular composer known as the Spanish Offenbach. Valverde’s most dramatic dance number in the show, however, was La corrida, the story of a bullfight in which the matador hunts and kills his prey. When Argentina heard it in rehearsal, she immediately recognized the dramatic power of the dance. She asked the directors if she could both choreograph and perform it. La corrida became her signature piece and remained in her repertory of short solo dances until the day she died.

      In it, Argentina was to enact both the predatory motion of the bull and the sadistic plunging of knives into the bull’s back by the banderillos. Her effortless control and machine-gun fire-like stamping on the floor, executed as the bull falls to the ground, showed the banderillos to be the sadistic slayers they are.⁵⁹ In the 28 September issue of the theatrical review Comoedia, the critic M. Emery noted that “the enthusiasm, the adoration of the audience fell, above all, on this small dancer who made her debut on the Parisian stage, if I am correct, yesterday afternoon…. This wonderful Argentina will be one of our idols tomorrow.”⁶⁰ Monsieur Emery’s intuition proved correct.

      After completing the run of the show, Argentina was once again contracted by the music hall impresarios. This time, she was to perform a solo of her own making, set within a new Valverde extravaganza. An operetta in two acts and four scenes, The Rose of Granada, with costumes by the famous Madame Hannaux,