Antonia Mercé, "LaArgentina". Ninotchka Bennahum

like Néstor and Ernesto Halffter and others of the so-called Spanish New School. Argentina’s friend and mentor, Manuel de Falla, introduced her to the idea of lifetime collaboration. Falla had composed Le Tricorne for Diaghilev in 1915 as the Ballets Russes sat out the First World War in non-aligned Spain, and working with Diaghilev, he might have thought it the best means of creating dance-theater: musical, libretto, scene design, and choreographic elements produced by different people, and brought together as an integrated composite spectacle.

      The meticulous professionalism of her productions, whether small-scale or large, proved that her desire was to create a Spanish form of modernist dance-theater much like that created by Diaghilev. With her own company, Les Ballets Espagnols, Argentina demonstrated her allegiance to the broad aesthetic of the Ballets Russes: the collaboration of Fokine and Stravinsky in Petrouchka (1911), Nijinsky and Stravinsky in Le Sacre du printemps (1913), Falla and Massine in Le Tricorne (1919), and Stravinsky and Bronislava Nijinska in Les Noces (1923).

      Moreover, much like the “primitive” people who populate Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, as well as the populist acrobats who catch the eye in Fokine’s Petrushka, Argentina’s flamenco cuadros signify her desire to return to popular roots, much as Diaghilev had.²⁰ Might she have seen Sacre? Argentina was in Paris in 1911 when it was first shown. It is most likely that she saw it, and that it had a significant effect on her choreographic structure. Perhaps it was the reason she wanted to perform in Russia; to learn from the Maryinsky dancers and to experience Theater Street for herself.²¹

      Like Fokine before her, Argentina was fully aware of the important play between soloist and ballet company. It is this tension between bailaora and caudro that heightens the isolation of the flamenco figure dancing alone in soleá (a melancholic Andalusian song and dance). Argentina’s lifelong, and most applauded, solos remained the musicless Seguidillas, performed to the accompaniment of her own hands with castanets, and La corrida, performed to Valverde’s music or to her castanets alone.²² La corrida was, in fact, her first choreography for the Moulin Rouge. In it, she reenacted the cruelty and show of the bullfight and its arena, the Corrida.

      Argentina’s most important debt to Fokine was the romanticization of the folkloric for use as choreographic material. The crowd became the community just as the corps de ballet had symbolized the onstage family. Like Fokine, Argentina extracted the soloist from the corps, thus emphasizing the body and, later, integrating the solo divertissement within the dances performed en masse. For example, Fokine’s carnival scene in Petrouchka, replete with ordinary street-fair activity—acrobats, magical shows, and food displays—may have influenced Argentina’s fishmarket scene in La malagueña (1932), which bustled with regional dances and various other transactions. Her choreography broke with the routine of traditionally peaceful Spanish ballet displays of eighteenth-century majas (elegant young women).²³ Instead, Argentina created background movement and noise and the seemingly ordinary exchange of money at market time, acted out through dance and song.

      For her 1925 version of El amor brujo, Argentina seemingly was influenced by Nijinsky’s vision of Russia’s past in Sacre. Like him, she relied on pantomimed magic to tell her tale of incantation and love, reconstructing the Gypsy tradition of sorcery. In it, Argentina danced like a bruja (witch), around a fire built on the earthen floor of a white-washed pueblo in Cádiz. The Gypsy women gathered around the fire, whispering magical tales during the “ritual dance of fire.” The result mirrored the virgin sacrifice in Sacre.

       Hispanic Modernism

      Folk culture, then, which might be molded and reconstructed, became one of the most significant and useful tools of Fokine, Nijinsky—and Argentina—to express the modernism of the moment. It is seen, for example, both in Nijinsky’s L’Après-Midi d’un faun and in Argentina’s Cuadro flamenco, also known as En el corazón de Sevilla (1928). For Argentina, “hispanism as modernism,” as the French artist Desbarolles termed it in 1851, was a modus vivendi, as well as the material through which she, like her Russian models, discovered her voice.²⁴

      With the formation of Les Ballets Espagnols in 1928, Argentina became known as the Flamenco Pavlova, a self-produced female artist. She was accompanied by fifty-member orchestras, often conducted by the Spanish maestro Enrique Fernández Arbós, and she was partnered by Vicente Escudero and the great French mime Georges Wague. When she died on 18 July 1936, Argentina’s obituary appeared on the front page of newspapers around the world. From this recognition, it is clear that her death signaled the end of an era of great Spanish dance-theater. Today, a faint echo of her meticulous attention to detail, her fierce musicality, enormous charisma, and ceaseless devotion to the stage survives in the filmic collaborations of Carlos Saura and Antonio Gades, the dance-dramas of Mario Maya, and the flamenco-ballets of Manolo Marín. Curiously, no other Spanish woman has rivaled Argentina as a performer, director, and choreographer. Yet few cultural historians have remembered her. How could an individual, so famous in her own time, be so little remembered by the country that thought of her as “the soul of Spain,” as its cultural ambassadress?²⁵ Perhaps the politically tense decades, discussed in chapter 6, both before and after her death in 1936 help explain why Argentina remains a forgotten figure in Spanish cultural history.

       The Spanish Civil War

      In the words of the prime minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, “the gathering storm of fascism” was building to the south. In 1933, with the rise of Hitler, it would change Europe forever; in 1936, with the Spanish civil war, the essence of Spanish life and culture. Argentina, Lorca, Falla, and the Spanish New School writers and composers were about to lose their artistic homeland. Under Franco, Spain would return to the repressive, fascist state it had been during the Inquisition (1478–1834). For many, their lives would be destroyed in the wake of the 1936 invasion by General Francisco Franco’s thousands of troops. The Spanish Falange political movement would come with him from Morocco, through southern Spain, in just three days. It would finally enter Barcelona on 18 July 1936—the day that Argentina died.

      The Spanish modern artistic world, with whom Argentina had gravitated to Paris, would soon be dispersed around the world, in a state of permanent exile. Lorca would be killed by the peasant Falange of Granada shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish civil war.²⁶ Despite an American presence in the form of the idealistic volunteer Abraham Lincoln Brigade (where authors George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway had joined in the democratic resistance movement), the Spanish Republic crumbled under the force of German air support and Franco’s troops, city after city falling into the hands of the dictator.

      Argentina, like most Spaniards, had foreseen the war. From the summer of 1928 and for eight years until her death in 1936, Argentina wrote to her best friend, the pianist Joaquín Nín (brother of the author Anais), about her great political fears and personal sadness at the “destruction of [my] beautiful country by conservative forces.”²⁷ And Nín replied, “Spain is still sick. Let’s hope that there is a remedy for this crisis and that in the end reason prevails…. So far, there has been little progress. The peseta is anemic. We are managing and that is not bad.”²⁸ The Catalan capital would be overtaken in less than one year. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the first picture he painted since 1935, became a symbol of the bombing. Guernica, a pictorial, political chronicle in black, white, and gray of the horrors of war in the Spanish village of Guernica, bore witness to the outrage which Goya had recorded in 1805. (It now hangs in the Reiña Sophia in Madrid, testifying to the ghosts of that war, and all war—the victims and their silence.) While the Guernica would become an international icon, La Argentina would fade away, until little of her art or memory remained. Few in 1936 would have imagined such a fate for a woman at the peak of her international fame and artistry, with such influence on the artists and culture of her time. Yet, she was forgotten. How this came to be is one of the mysteries of our century. How it happened partly reflects the ephemeral nature of dance, a dynamic art form rooted in the now that defies static attempts at preservation.

      By 1939,