Antonia Mercé, “LaArgentina”

Antonia Mercé, “LaArgentina”
Author: Ninotchka Bennahum
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2014-08-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0819575577

Antonia Mercé, stage-named La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Her intensive musical and theatrical collaborations with members of the Spanish vanguard -- Manuel de Falla, Frederico García Lorca, Enrique Granados, Néstor de la Torre, Joaquín Nín, and with renowned Andalusian Gypsy dancers -- reflect her importance as an artistic symbol for contemporary Spain and its cultural history. When she died in 1936, newspapers around the world mourned the passing of the "Flamenco Pavlova."

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance
Author: Walter Aaron Clark
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2019-06-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1527536254

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados is an exploration of two fandango dances, recording the circulations of people, imagery, music, and dance across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Although these dance-musics seem to be mirror images, the unbreachable space between them reflects the political fault-lines along which nineteenth-century musical populism and folkloric nationalism extend into present-day debates about globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, and neofascism. If malagueñas are a fantastic incarnation of Spanishness, caught like a fly in amber by their anachronistic references to a fraught imperial past, noisy and raucous zapateado dances cut toward the future. Inherently marked by European conventions of zapatos (shoes), zapateados are nonetheless shaped by Africanist and Native American footwork traditions. In these Afro-Indigenous mestizajes, not only are European aesthetic values reordered and resignified, but the Catholic catechism which indoctrinated the New World yields to alternate spiritual systems springing out of a culture of resistance to European domination.

La Meri and Her Life in Dance

La Meri and Her Life in Dance
Author: Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0813065119

This intriguing biography details the life and work of world dance pioneer La Meri (1899–1988). An American dancer, choreographer, teacher, and writer, La Meri was ahead of her time in championing cross-cultural dance performances and education, yet she is almost totally forgotten today. In La Meri and Her Life in Dance, Nancy Ruyter introduces readers to a visionary artist who played a pivotal role in dance history. Born in Texas as Russell Meriwether Hughes, La Meri toured throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, immersing herself in different dance traditions at a time when few American dancers explored styles outside their own. She learned about Indian dance culture from the celebrated Uday Shankar, studied belly dancing with the Moroccan sultan’s top dancer, and took flamenco lessons in Spain. La Meri spread awareness and enjoyment of the world’s myriad forms of expression before it was common for performing artists from these countries to tour internationally. Ruyter describes how La Meri founded the Ethnologic Dance Center in New York City, choreographed innovative works based on various dance cultures for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and other venues, and wrote widely on the styles and techniques of international dance genres. This long-overdue book illustrates that the popularity of world dance today owes much to the trailblazing efforts of La Meri.

Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde

Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde
Author: Shirley Mangini
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351559095

The first book in English on Maruja Mallo, this volume is an insightful examination of the life and work of this seminal artist of the Spanish avant-garde. Previously sidelined by a culture that treated women as "insider-outsiders" and by her own mythmaking, Mallo no longer can be viewed as simply a muse to famous counterparts such as Salvador Dal?nd Federico Garc?Lorca; her role has been re-contextualized to demonstrate that she was a driving force in the flowering of Spanish culture through the 1920s and 1930s. The analysis of Mallo's unique life and extraordinary art is set against the complicated social and political backdrop of interwar Madrid. This book highlights the struggle of Mallo and other women artists against the rampant misogyny of both Spanish culture and the avant-garde community of the time. The effects of the Spanish Civil War are also analyzed-in Mallo's case, Franco's victory forced her into exile in South America for almost 30 years, with profound effects on her art and her life. Added to this rich context, the author's numerous interviews with members of the Mallo family provide essential new background material. Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde recasts this artist as a vital figure in the heretofore all-male establishment of the Spanish artistic vanguard.

Whose Spain?

Whose Spain?
Author: Samuel Llano
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199858462

English with excerpts in Spanish and French.

Deep Song

Deep Song
Author: Stephen Roberts
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-07-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1789142466

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) is perhaps Spain’s most famous writer and cultural icon. By the age of thirty, he had become the most successful member of a brilliant generation of poets, winning critical and popular acclaim by fusing traditional and avant-garde themes and techniques. He would go on to reinvent Spanish theater too, writing bold, experimental, and often shocking plays that dared openly to explore both female and homosexual desire. A vibrant and mercurial personality, by the time Lorca visited Argentina in late 1933, he had become the most celebrated writer and cultural figure in the Spanish-speaking world. But Lorca’s fame could not survive politics: his identification with the splendor of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–36) was one of the reasons behind Lorca’s murder in August 1936 at the hands of right-wing insurgents at the start of the Spanish Civil War. In this biography, Stephen Roberts seeks out the roots of the man and his work in the places in which Lorca lived and died: the Granadan countryside where he spent his childhood; the Granada and Madrid of the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s where he received his education and achieved success as a writer; his influential visits to Catalonia, New York, Cuba, and Argentina; and the mountains outside Granada where his body still lies in an undiscovered grave. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of a complex and brilliant man as well as new insight into the works that helped to make his name.

Flamenco on the Global Stage

Flamenco on the Global Stage
Author: K. Meira Goldberg
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2015-10-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476621020

The language of the body is central to the study of flamenco. From the records of the Inquisition, to 16th century literature, to European travel diaries, the Spanish dancer beguiles and fascinates. The word flamenco evokes the image of a sensuous and rebellious woman--the bailaora --whose movements seduce the audience, only to reject their attention with a stomp of defiance. The dancer's body is an agent of ideological resistance, conveying a conflicting desire for subjectivity and autonomy and implying deeply held ideas about history, national identity, femininity and masculinity. This collection of new essays provides an overview of flamenco scholarship, illuminating flamenco's narrative and chronology and addressing some common misconceptions. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on age-old themes and suggest new paradigms for flamenco as a cultural practice. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.