Antonia Mercé, "LaArgentina". Ninotchka Bennahum

verse. But it was Argentina who began as early as 1905—her first adult trip to Andalusia—to study and then use flamenco’s other elements: its fierce zapateado (footwork) and its intensely contemplative, sensually focused individualism of the bailaor (dancer). Flamenco was intended to complete the Spanish neonationalist philosophers’, Felipe Pedrell and Adolfo Salazar’s, mission: to help “save” Gypsy culture from commercialization and industrialization. Like most dancers, Argentina believed that to preserve a culture was to embody it. Yet Argentina was to go one step further than such figures as Pedrell, García Lorca, and Falla. She was to use the flamenco tree, its cantes chicos y jondos (light and heavy songs), to modernize Spanish ballet, thus helping to elucidate Spanish culture.

      Falla recognized in Argentina’s work the visual realization of his scores. “With so much excitement,” he wrote, “did I read what you told me about the latest of El amor brujo, which owes so much to your splendid art. I can’t imagine it any more without your work! I assure you of that! And with your work it will have to be.”¹³ And García Lorca echoed his great friend in his dedication of three ballads from Poema del cante jondo to the artist of whom he was a “fervent admirer.”¹⁴ “This is where I wanted to express the very personal art of La Argentina, the creator, inventor, indigenous and universal,” he wrote.¹⁵

      After 1915, Argentina’s modernist approach to Spanish theater—exoticism as neoprimitivism in the service of the neonational—appeared with greater frequency. And Argentina’s solos became longer, with fewer danced each night, as each dance began to contain a more sophisticated narrative. Slowly, Argentina began to mount full-evening ballets with libretti and orchestration. By 1925, she had created El amor brujo, thus realizing her personal aesthetic.

      Argentina posing with Filipino folk dancers after her own performance at a dance festival in Manila. From the Filipino dancers Argentina learned the steps and music for La Cariñosa, which she made into a solo ballet with costumes sewn by the Callots Soeurs.

      Argentina had also absorbed the local traditions of other countries in which she toured. For example, in the Philippines she learned a popular folk dance, la cariñosa, performed in layers of silk cloth (color plate 6). She learned the dance’s rhythms and repetitions and copied the costume. She lengthened and straightened the dress into a columnar cascade of straight, Art Deco lines, however, and added a fan, a typically Spanish prop. Argentina’s La cariñosa, became one of her most famous and frequently performed solo dances.¹⁶

       French Orientalism

      Interested in the new Paris fashions—Jean Patou’s gowns, Maximilian’s furs, and French haute couture designs—Argentina achieved a kind of fashion synthesis, an idiosyncratic couture for her production, with folk motifs, usually two-dimensional, representational drawings of agrarian scenes, and Néstor de la Torre’s cubist fracture of Gypsy tabernas (taverns) and grottos. Between the resulting curved and straightened lines she danced, using her complex choreographies to unite sight, sound, and effect.

      Argentina’s expression of these cultures became ceaseless, echoing what Théophile Gautier termed “les couleurs locales.” The neoprimitivist aesthetic of El amor brujo, Juerga, and Triana, in particular, which were examples of a neofolk vision, sewn onto costumes and stamped out in taconeo, or heelwork, give evidence of Argentina’s innovation—her ability to “reinvent traditions,” as Eric Hobsbawm has described such ethnographic art.¹⁷

      Several other important sources fueled Argentina’s representation of the Spanish folk: the French Romanticism that began in the 1840s in painting and literature, and the ethnographic modernism that had been associated with the Ballets Russes’s productions, such as Petrouchka and Le Sacre du printemps. French interest in Spain had awakened during the French invasion and occupation of the country during the Napoleonic period. The French regarded Spain as “the gateway to the Orient.”¹⁸

      At that time, the Spanish saw themselves as separate from the rest of Europe. The southern regions of Spain—what Garcia Lorca referred to as the three-cornered hat of Seville, Granada, and Cordoba—had been ruled by moderate and fundamentalist Islamic caliphs from North Africa during the Middle Ages from 711 to the last in Granada, in 1492. The Spanish Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, reconquered a new, all-Catholic, white Spain. Nevertheless, the vast architectural and cultural influence of the eight-hundred-year presence of the Moors and Jews—of Mozarabic culture—dominates the Spanish landscape even into the twentieth century. (The Jews, who entered Spain as Roman slaves and merchants in 450 B.C.E., and the Moors inscribed an oriental socioeconomic and political outlook on Andalusia—a non-Western approach to social behavior and artistic creation that, though long gone, still continues to influence southern Spain today.

      

      Argentina on her third world tour to Asia, 1930.

      The philosopher Miguel de Unamuno explained Spain’s self-identification in this light. “We must Africanize ourselves ancientwise,” he said, “or we must ancientize ourselves Africanwise.”¹⁹ This self-orientalism explains something of the Spanish character: sensual, sometimes cruel, and self-deprecating, the conquered and the conqueror at once; the victim of her own bloodlust, like that in the bullfight. In La corrida, Argentina’s signature piece, she reflected Unamuno’s words.

      France’s romanticized view of Spain persisted until the Spanish civil war (1936–39). The French adoption of the mystical and mysterious nature of Spain’s Moorish heritage was paralleled by the vogue for Spanish dancers and singers on the Paris music hall stage. “Spanish” acts of dubious authenticity were popular. Beyond that, they were associated, as in the case of Carolina (“La Belle”) Otero, with dancers of equally questionable morals. The result projected an image of Spain divorced from the rest of Europe. The Spanish specialty acts on the music hall stages presented an exotic, erotic, and culturally separate “other” Their representations of Andalusian Gypsies, much like that of nineteenth-century American minstrel shows, portrayed a lewd and lascivious population. In the case of the southern Spanish Gypsies, they were situated within Spain almost by chance. Although Gypsies had wandered into Europe between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries, exiled from Rajasthan by Muslim invaders, they are considered outsiders to this day, just like the Moors and the Jews. Gypsy customs—their dancing, singing, clothing—were considered strange and inferior to those of the white European, even after their incorporation into European tradition over the centuries, with their forced conversion to Catholicism from the early fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

      

      Argentina on her fifth world tour visiting the Sphinx in Egypt with a guide, 1934

      French painter Henri Matisse’s large triptychs of seated North African women surrounded by deep purples and the light blue of a highly sensual, luscious, and romanticized Mediterranean, for instance, serve as perfect examples of the French fascination with Moorish culture along the Iberian Peninsula. Their heads bowed down in quiet contemplation, the women appear almost invisible, hidden in the shadows of rounded doorways or seated subserviently, awaiting someone’s entrance. So silent are Matisse’s views, one can hear the wind. Matisse’s round skies and flat figures would become backdrops for Argentina’s ballets.

       Russian Orientalism

      A major influence on Argentina’s choreographic composition, perhaps the most significant, was the Ballets Russes, the Russian-trained modernist ballet company first brought to Paris by impresario Serge Diaghilev in 1909. The Ballets Russes productions were the result of close collaborations among musicians, poets, painters, designers, and dancers. There is no question that Argentina saw a number of their productions from her time in the French music halls to the time she formed her own company. It was evident in the fusionist