Argentina’s body would, from 1912 to 1923, become the point of departure for a new Spanish dance-theater, as envisioned and executed in performance by its new dance director. By 1921, when Russo-French dance critic André Levinson and French poet Paul Valéry saw Argentina for the first time on the concert stage, Argentina was already thirty-three years old. Slimmer than when she was playing Spanish tablaos, Argentina had emerged into a long, thin, graceful embodiment of “the plastique”—the modernist iconic contour that the American dancer Loïe Fuller had already brought to France in 1892. Argentina’s slimming accompanied her honing, crafting, and refinishing of the choreographic act that would be her communicative vocabulary on the North and South American continents throughout World War I. How could Argentina become a creative agent during a period of political instability in Spain and the widespread killing in Europe? She was young and determined. As an artist and a director, she was unstoppable.
Before she found a way to build her own company, bringing individuality and charisma to whatever small part she was given in Paris by the producers of shows at the Jardin de Paris, the Moulin Rouge, the Olympia, and the Femina music halls, Argentina was like no other Spanish dancer who had preceded her to France. Although she would travel the same route they did, touring South and North America and northern Europe, Argentina would not remain in the the music halls.
Until 1923 when she had her first Parisian concert performance and gave her first lecture-demonstration with André Levinson, Argentina was in search of a venue. She sought a respected place of “high” art-dance, in which she could reinvent the Spanish dance as she came to envision it in 1920s Paris. Argentina’s artistic and geographical journey from the Moulin Rouge to the Théâtre Femina, from Madrid to Paris to Russia and New York, laid the groundwork for her later full-length flamenco theater pieces, El amor brujo (1925) and Triana (1929).
Interestingly, she would never ask her countryman Picasso, who lived in Paris throughout her career, to design for her (although he would paint the modernist sets for Le Tricorne, a Spanish flamenco ballet that was presented by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1919). Argentina wanted to realize her own complete staging, from mise-en-scène to flamenco footwork. That drive helped catapult her into contemporary consciousness, taking her from the commercial stage and placing her on the Paris Opéra stage in 1921, where she presented an evening of Spanish dance and music. Yet she would return to the music halls and to the casinos of Biarritz, Saint Moritz, Nice, and Monte Carlo throughout her entire life, as there she could earn large fees, enough to pay her dancers, musicians, and staff, to rent big-city theaters, and to support her own family (her brother José and his two children) in Madrid.
Argentina had left the Teatro Real de Madrid in 1898, when she was ten, and traveled widely in Spain, and found dance and cultural material with which she would eventually form a repertory of more than sixty-seven solo dances. By the early 1920s, when she was in her thirties, Argentina had become an artist whose vision was transnational; it crossed borders, wedding the artistry of music, scenery, and dance. Then in 1925, she would realize one of the most important Spanish ballets of the twentieth century, one that is still performed around the world today: El amor brujo. In 1923, Argentina had already joined some solos into one-act, formally narrative ballets. In them, she retained her earlier emphasis on the primacy of rhythm as the driving force, the modus vivendi behind any storyline. During her lifelong search for ideas and inspiration, she gathered materials with which she would create seven complete, full-length ballets between 1925 and 1934.
Paris could be grand in 1912. Its cafés were filled with stylish French ladies and gentlemen, and with American and European expatriates, some of them drinking café crèmes at the Café de Flore. Many flocked to all night dance clubs like the Mabillon in Montmartre where a dame seule could dance alone, with a friend, or pay for a partner at a franc a dance. Everyone knew how to dance the tango—a two-step—and many faked Le Fox, or the Fox Trot. Others had heard rumor of the complicated, four-step Le Java dance, but few knew how to execute it. The ladies wore low-backed evening dresses, tight pearl chokers, and high-heeled stiletto shoes. Their long cigarette holders were perpetually held to the side, like some prop in a musical at the L’Empyrée Clichy music hall, where Colette had often worked.4 The men wore shirts with high-necked collars and silk foulard ties. They smoked cigars and stroked long thick beards, which they rarely trimmed or shaved. They wore fitted suits and heavy cloaks, and they twisted and waxed the ends of their long mustaches upward to the sky.
The French dance halls (bals musettes) were a part of every Parisian neighborhood, but they were special in the Left Bank bohemian quarters of Montparnasse and Montmartre. Women and men drank a great deal of champagne in those clubs de nuit in the Champs-Elysées district.5 Poets, painters, writers, and the voyeurs who eavesdropped on the Left Bank frequented Montparnasse. They sat on the café terraces of the Dôme and the Select, as well as the infamous Deux Magots. The literati, such as Hemingway and, later, Jean-Paul Sartre, spent hours on end in cafés observing and talking. Writing was discussed at the Closerie de Lilas café, “across from the old Bal Bullier dance hall,” and discussions were interrupted by people reading one of the eight daily Paris papers.6 By the second decade of the century, the “lustrous, slicked-back” Argentinian tango had become Paris’s new dance rage. Couturier Paul Poiret was accentuating the female form, hugging tight the hips and buttocks, and leaving free women’s naked arms for long gloves adorned with multiple rings of gold and pearl bracelets.
Into this Parisian world Argentina came from Spain in 1910, at age twenty-two (but she often shaved two years off). Following the success of her short number, La corrida, in Valverde’s comic operetta La Rose de Grenade, Argentina felt encouraged by theater managers and the popular press to continue engagements in the music hall venue. Such bookings proved both lucrative and challenging; and, as Colette reminded her readers, they were the place for a fledgling artist.
At the end of February 1912, Argentina left the Olympia Theater in Paris, to travel to Monte Carlo on the Riviera. There she performed in a flamenco operetta, La Bella Sevillana, in which she danced a short solo. According to the Monte Carlo Chronicles, a publication announcing “what’s going on in Monte Carlo,” Argentina was then cast in another extravaganza—“a big spectacle”—called “Espada,” with music by Jules Massenet.7 The show consisted of one hundred and seventy-five dancers. Argentina was one of many principal soloists. It traveled to Brussels’s Royal Belgian Theater, where it had four engagements, and from Belgium to Berlin’s Winter Garden.
In May, Argentina returned to Madrid where she undertook rehearsals for an important engagement. She prepared a series of solo dances to be performed at a private concert at the royal palace on 5 June. Her audience was to be the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, and members of his royal entourage. Following the performance, King Alfonso presented “La Bella Argentina” with a golden box that housed a pair of gold and pearl earrings, to thank her for her dancing.8 Ten days later, on 15 June, Jacinto Benavente, Santiago Rusiñol, and Romero de Torres, three of the most distinguished members of Madrid’s literary vanguard, had organized an homage to the new star in the house of the Spanish sculptor Sebastian Miranda. They honored her with a portrait of herself, painted by Miranda (which still hangs in the office of the president of the Ateneo in Madrid), bearing the names of intellectuals and artists who admired and adored her: Cánovas Cervantes, Tomás Borrás, Luis Bagaría, Alvarez Quintero, Jacinto Benavente, Luis Bello, Manuel Tovar, Romero de Torres, and Julio Antonio. On 7 December, Argentina debuted in yet another salon, the Salón Llorens in Seville, and remained there under contract until the end of 1912, continuing her flamenco studies and regional folk dance analysis—studies she would pursue for the