She took a Spanish name (María Alba), studied with Mariquita Flores, and stopped speaking English. After seeing a performance by Carmen Amaya in the early fifties, Fitzmaurice was so impressed that she decided to remake herself as a flamenco dancer.
(A similar dress, belonging to another dancer, appears in a glass case in the show.) The American-born Santana was a student of María Alba, née Joan Fitzmaurice, a porcelain-skinned Irish American with Broadway aspirations. An example is Santana herself, captured in a photo by Victor DeLiso wearing an extraordinary blood-red, orchid-like bata de cola, flounces billowing around her like sea foam, arms held proudly aloft. And yet, despite the differences, they began to form a kind of family everyone in the show seems to be connected to everyone else in some way. Each performer had her own style (and at first, they were mostly women) connected to her place of origin, training, and temperament. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsĮventually, as more flamencos toured to New York or, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, settled here, Spanish dance began to take root and flourish. In the forties, the French artist Jean Cocteau wrote of the gypsy performer Carmen Amaya that “not since Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes have we been able to experience this kind of lovers’ tryst in a theatre.” A sketch by Nestor de la Torre of the dancer La Argentina, friend of Federico García Lorca and choreographer of note, depicts her as a seductive creature with a sinuous back and languorous curves. The curving lines and powerful, earthy movements of flamenco and the classicized folk dance bolero suggested a kind of freedom from convention and sensual abandon. American women had their portraits taken holding fans, wearing mantones (fringed shawls) and giant earrings. Visits by performers like La Cuenca and Carmencita fanned the fashion for all things Iberian. The dramatis personae includes the Viennese ballerina Fanny Elssler, famous for her cachuca, which she brought over in 1840 the Catalan gypsy-a real spitfire-Carmen Amaya, who shook up the scene when she relocated here after the Spanish Civil War and on to the strikingly handsome, Brooklyn-raised José Greco and others: Martin Santángelo, Soledad Barrio, Leilah Broukhim, and Nélida Tirado.īy the turn of the past century, Spanish dance had come to symbolize the exotic, modern, and outré. What emerges is a vivid, often surprising, account of the continuous presence of Spanish dance, in its various forms: authentic, fanciful, exotique, or fused with dances as disparate as tango and ragtime. Supported by the New York Council for the Humanities, the show is a joint venture of the library and Carlota Santana, a New York-based teacher and company director, who is the doyenne of New York flamenco. Its contents, and the accompanying program of flamenco films, are drawn from the library’s extensive dance holdings as well as various private collections. Meira Goldberg and Ninotchka Bennahum, this turns out to be the first retrospective tracing the evolution of Spanish dance in the city. It does not store any personal data.Presented at the downstairs Vincent Astor Gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and curated by the flamenco experts K. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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