Reflections
During the 1930s in the United States, the modern dance pioneers—Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, and Doris Humphrey—believed that Americans must share a common experience, common goals, and a unifying form of expression. Graham, especially, discovered Frederick Jackson Turner’s visionary Americanism in frequent visits to New Mexico between 1935 and 1948. She returned to New York, creating Frontier in 1935 and Appalachian Spring in 1944, the movement recalling the earthy vistas of the American painter Georgia O’Keefe and the chaco canyons of the Anasazi people. Graham danced the wide open spaces of the American West. Similarly, Argentina discovered in Spain—a country both austere and beautiful, harsh and sensual—what Graham had found in America. By interlacing her choreographies with Spanish legends and rhythms, Argentina, like Graham, dedicated her life to what she thought to be its essence, its truth. Argentina beat out the compás of Spain’s forty-nine provinces through her heels, as though she existed in every single space simultaneously, as though she were from every part of Spain’s territory, entering and exiting its churches, fiestas, and funerals. In her own way, she donned the hat of the eighteenth-century Catalonian maja, or threw about herself the mantilla of the nineteenth-century Andalusian peasant woman.
Caricature of Argentina in La Gitane, F.B.M.; by choreographed 1919, music by Valverde, costumes by Federico Beltrán-Masses.
It was Argentina’s reflections on Spain that made her the artistic and cultural spokeswoman for that country from 1914 until 1936. (In 1935 she was invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to perform at the White House.) Her inspired vision gave her a place among the Spanish intelligentsia. Argentina told a story that they, too, wanted their fellow countrymen to read, hear, and see. Through the world of Argentina’s ballets, a new artistic vision of Spain was disseminated. In El amor brujo (solo dances, 1923, 1925, 1928), El contrebandista (solo dances, 1927, full ballet, 1928), Triana (solo dances, 1927, 1929), La vida breve (full ballet, 1928), and El fandango del candil (solo dances, 1921; full ballet, 1928), this Spanish visionary produced, presented, and danced her own modernist masterpieces, theater-works that represented a dancer’s story of Spain.
| THE FORMATIVE YEARS (1888–1912) I serve a mute art and seek the full range of expression through step patterns, through the unfolding of movement, and through the use of mime. My surest vocabulary proceeds through my ankles, my arms, my hands, the lines of my body, and the expression on my face. I like and am accustomed to making myself understood in silence, or rather, adding only to my silence the musical voice far from words, which I find of somewhat limited use. I really believe that as a result of asking nothing from words in the practice of my art, I have learned to live at a certain distance from them. — La Argentina, quoted in de Soye, Toi qui dansais, Argentina | 2 |
Antonia Rosa Mercé was born in a boardinghouse in central Buenos Aires on 4 September 1888. Her parents were dancers who earned a little extra money touring South America with a company of stars from Madrid’s Teatro Real. Like the Russian Imperial Theaters (the Maryinsky), the Teatro Real enjoyed royal patronage; King Alfonso XIII loved dance, mime, music, painting, and pretty women. Under Alfonso’s watchful eye, the Teatro Real engaged Italian and Spanish dancing masters, considered the best, to train his corps de ballet and principal soloists in the complex art of French, Italian, and Spanish theatrical dance.1
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Teatro Real de Madrid and its affiliated academy, the Royal Academy of Dance, had come under the influence of the Italian teachers and their choreographic practices.2 Argentina’s father, Señor Mercé, taught Spanish classical technique, a court form that required musical precision, focus, muscular strength, and balance.
The Spanish classical school’s main step—the bolero—was, as Carlo Blasis described it in 1831, “a dance far more noble, modest and restrained than the fandango,” that Moorish-Gypsy dance that Argentina would later incorporate into her Spanish classical repertory. While the Italian ballet emphasized the linearity of the upper torso, the body held in seemingly weightless and effortless poses, the Spanish technique required the dancer to become the musical line; it used the body as a means of expressing the music. The body became the musical agent, the accompaniment to the castanets.3 The Spanish dance was, indeed, less concerned with the outline or contour of a dancer and her posing and more evocative of space and time. The Spanish school—the escuela bolera—in particular, was a technical dance form; its emphasis lay less on the aerial flotation or bodily extension out into space that was typical of Italian ballet and more on how well the dancer used quick moves of the head, arms, and feet to express emotional states. The escuela bolera was the technique to which Señor Mercé dedicated his life, in which he reluctantly trained his daughter.
Argentina’s father, Francísco Manoël Mercé, native of Castile, was one of the dancing masters. Born in Valladolid in the year 1860, forty-five kilometers from Madrid, Mercé was both primero bailerin and maestro.4 He was considered to be a “a remarkable technician” in his prime.5 In a 1936 interview with French biographer Suzanne F. Cordelier, Argentina described her father as “a great interpreter of the Spanish schools of dance”: the Spanish classical school, the Franco-Italian classical ballet school, and the many Spanish regional dancing styles.6 Argentina, influenced by her father’s training system, took these three schools recognized by the Spanish dance academy and combined them with Gypsy flamenco, thus recognizing Gypsy dance as a fourth school, an aesthetic genre of its own. Taking the flamenco technique out of its folk dance categorization and placing it on an equal footing with regional dances of the Spanish classical technique, Argentina refocused the training and, therefore, the sociocultural aesthetic of Spanish dance tradition. Placing flamenco and Spanish classical dance together with western and northern European ballet traditions, Argentina transformed Spanish dance, organizing its schools through modern(ist) dance steps, the basis for her fame and her legacy.7
The boarding house in Buenos Aires where Argentina was born on 4 september 1888.
Argentina posing in costume for Suite Andaluza, 1935.
But Argentina criticized her father claiming that “he went no further…. He never created…. He didn’t live through his soul. For my father dance was a body of cold and very solid rules, as dense as lead.”8 This is a very harsh criticism from a forty-eight-year-old woman, clearly mature and successful in her own professional career when giving this interview. However, Argentina’s open anger and frustration at her father’s inability to go beyond academic strictures must have felt suffocating to her as a child. The quote bears witness to Argentina’s rite of passage, from young student of her father’s to innovator and reformer of the Spanish classical training system.
Although Cordelier relied heavily on Argentina’s memory, so many years after the fact, she was careful to include the words of the Spanish dance critic Luis Montsalvatge, who completed Mercé’s daughter’s critique with praise: “He was a dancer of the trade,’’ claimed Montsalvatge, “full of technical knowledge…. Manuel [possessed] irreproachable technique…. [He was] a true and loyal performer.”9
Manoél Mercé was trained in all