Antonia Mercé, "LaArgentina". Ninotchka Bennahum

she performed, the local press saluted her castanet-playing, her pretty face, and her dancing. So far, neither the “serious” French press nor the Parisian literati—Paul Valéry, Jacques Rivière, Jean Cocteau, Robert Brussel, Henri Malherbe—had seen her, athough she was hailed as a star in her own country. She played Luna Park in Brussels in early 1913, the Teatro Lara in Madrid, and the Salón Imperial in Melilla. By May, Argentina was performing at the Aquarium Theater in Moscow and at the beginning of 1914, she was performing in London, alongside celebrated Gypsies, in the musical extravaganza El embrujo de Sevilla, there entitled The Haunting of Seville. In this extended engagement at London’s Alhambra Theater (where Diaghilev would premiere the Ballets Russes’ production Le Tricorne in 1919), Argentina was billed as a principal dancer and as a castanet-player. She was performing alongside artists and musicians from whom she had learned, those whom she most respected.⁹ The show went on to extended engagements in Paris, as well as in London, awarding Argentina as much publicity as a Spanish music hall artist could want.¹⁰

      

      “La Reine des Castanettes,” “Queen of the Castanets.” Argentina posing in her original costume for La Corrida, 1916.

      Having toured Europe and Russia, as part of one of several French and Spanish music hall acts and in musical theater works, and having played the Parisian theaters, Argentina was ready to break with other people’s shows. She wanted to continue to create her own work and to be her own artistic, musical, and dance director.¹¹ After a decade in the music halls of Europe, from 1904 to 1914, she was prepared to try to make it on her own. She was also in search of herself: in flamenco, she had discovered a rhythmic heartbeat much like her own, a soulful and soul-stirring source of inspiration.

      Like ballet, flamenco’s lines were strict, requiring a particular body carriage, positioning, and dance steps to form a sequence. Flamenco had an internal vocabulary all its own, and in learning and expressing it, Argentina could only become a great flamenca. She could never be of Gypsy ancestry, and she could never completely return to the Spanish classical tradition that had trained and fed her for the first decade of her professional life.

      Instead, in France, with its elegant Beaux Arts backdrop and new Art Deco lines, with its “liberated” women, its cafés, its artists and writers, Argentina had found a new way of seeing the female and of investigating the possibilities of shape, outline, motion, color, and power. She would soon take the potency of flamenco verse, the anxiety of its cante and its earthbound rhythm, and go on to generate a composite of what she most admired on the streets of Paris, fashioning it for the stage in the image of the Ballets Russes’s productions. She became herself as she wanted to be, at a time—August 1914—when the twentieth century was turning cruel and falling into World War I. With Tsar Nicholas IPs mobilization, Germany and Austria were fighting France, Russia, and Great Britain—and by 1917, the Russian Revolution began in earnest. The war ended in 1918 with the highest death toll ever on French soil at the Battles of the Somme and Verdun.

      Argentina spent the war years on tour in South America. By 1918, with the armistice, Argentina would find herself back in Paris and the city would welcome her look, her dance, and her performances as part of postwar Parisian life. The Paris Peace talks, which settled the postwar treaties—and asked Germany to pay huge reparations—and established new European borders, focused great attention on the French capital and in nearby Versailles. After several years of their international diplomacy and their diplomatic high life, the talks ended. Paris night life would soon be changed by Russian, Jewish and Eastern European exiles and American expatriates. It was the roaring twenties.

      Two late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish dance hall stars had, in a sense, paved the way for La Argentina to leave the music hall behind her and take to the stage of the Paris Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and the Femina theaters. Carmencita, the “Pearl of Seville” (1868–1910) and Carolina, “La Belle Otero” (1868–1965), each in her own way, had demonstrated the strengths of the Spanish idiom to be more than unspoiled exotic Gypsy ritual or the mere representation of regional folk dance; in their own ways, each showed flamenco’s earthy sensuality and boldly classical verticality to be both feminine and balletic, formal yet mystical. Further, each demonstrated the theatrical possibility inherent within the Spanish and Flamenco genres.

      Both Carmencita and Otero had appeared as the exotic “other,” playing on the myth of the seductive, licentious Andalusian Gypsy woman. They energized numerous dance acts, injecting a highly sexualized performance of sinuous femininity that traveled beyond exoticism, projecting the idea of a Spanish dancer who might become something beyond the “ethnic” act—a performer who was not just the family breadwinner but, perhaps, an “artiste.” They each had a certain special rhythmic, and therefore dramatic, story-telling capacity. Carmencita’s fandango, performed on a tiny New York music hall stage in 1890, “filled with tobacco smoke,” displayed a “poetry of motion” that was “revelatory, sensational, and devastating” to the viewer’s eye.¹³

      One spectatator in 1890 had recalled Carmencita’s performance as the appearance of youth—much as Loïe Fuller’s symbolist followers would describe her skillfully lit appearance. Carmencita’s “graceful and sinuous movements and ever-changing attitudes” displayed “a flexibility of body” performed in “an abandon of the physical” that is “perfectly astonishing.”¹⁴ Another writer remembered her “impassioned moments” of dance as the display of an “extraordinary personality that seizes the beholder and leaves him mystified with the power of their effect. She is [indeed] the incarnate harmony of form and motion. She is art personified.”¹⁵ Interestingly, as early as September 1890, “modern,” a word that would be used to describe Argentina’s South American performances between 1915 and 1918, had already been used to describe Carmencita’s predecessor.

      By the late nineteenth century, an interesting Spanish “art” dancer on the New York music hall stage had toured America. Like Carmencita, who has been captured in William Merrit Chase’s 1890 impressionistic painting, Carolina Otero also performed on New York dance hall stages. Unlike Carmencita, whose performance was considered a “curious mixture of feminine chastity” and Spanish “passion,” with multilayered skirts offering perhaps the best reminder of Sevillian Gypsy dancing, Otero preferred to play the Spanish diva, costumed in a white flounced gown that fell outside the traditions of her native Spanish origins.¹⁶ Although La Belle Otero could pull off the traditional 1890 crowd-pleasers—the seguidillas, jotas, boleros, tonadillas (ditties), and the singing that accompanied some version of the original cachucha¹⁷—it was her modern street dress combined with just a hint of an “authentic” Spain that helped make her a music hall star.

      Where Carmencita’s performance was “one of recklessness and wild energy, Otero displayed delicacy and finished appeal.”¹⁸ Carmencita, indeed, particularly embodied “the dance of Andalusia,” and between 1890 and 1910 both women had become huge stars, drawing crowds for music hall owners and producers. But neither even considered going beyond the commercial venue and onto the concert stage. Otero left and became known as a courtesan; Carmencita remained a popular sensation until she could no longer dance. With all of Carmencita’s dancing ability and charisma, her connections to painters like Sargent and Chase, and her many imitators in New York, she never saw herself as more than she was. As for Otero, although considered quite a good singer, a woman of elegant demeanor, and a “high-class” stage presence, she never thought to use this modern flamenca of her own making as a new way of looking at the Spanish dance. That is to say, the entire idiom—the techniques of both flamenco and Spanish classical dance—did not seduce either woman. Neither artist saw beyond the venue at hand, beyond the potential producer or the envious admirer. Yet they prepared the way for Argentina to go beyond mere replications of the Spanish dances.

      Argentina would play on both women’s talents, influenced by their costumes and their commercial, clever choice of songs and dances, in order to catapult herself into contemporary consciousness. Argentina was, indeed, combining the modern image of woman with the Romantic sylph. Her modernism was flamenco; her