the arrival of Shan-Kar, America had not been exposed to very much of
the dance of India. Twenty years before, the English woman known as
Roshanara had had a vogue in esoteric circles with her adaptations of
the dances of India and the East. On the other hand, the male dancing of
India was virtually unknown. As presented by Shan-Kar, this was revealed
in an expressive mime, with an emphasis on the enigmatic face, the flat
hand, using the upper part of the body as the chief medium of
expression, together with the unique use of the neck and shoulders, not
only for expression, but for accentuation of rhythm. New, also, to our
audiences were the spread knees, a type of movement exclusive to the
male Indian dancer.
Here was an art and an artist that seemingly had none of the
conventional elements of a popular success. About him and his
presentations there was nothing spectacular, nothing stunning, nothing
exciting. Colour was there, to be sure; but the dancing and the general
tone of the entertainment was all of a piece, on a single level,
soothing, and with that elusive, almost indefinable quality: the
serenity of the East.
Our associations, save for a brief period of mistrust on my part, have
always been pleasant. In addition to the original tour of 1932, I
brought him back in the season 1936-1937, and again in 1938-1939. The
war, of course, intervened, and I was unable to bring him again until
the season 1949-1950.
At the outbreak of the war, through the benefaction of the Elmhirst
Foundation of Dartington Hall, England, an activity organized by the
former Dorothy Straight, Shan-Kar was enabled to found a school for the
dance and a center for research into Hindu lore, which he set up in
Benares. One outcome of this research center was the production of a
motion picture film dealing with this lore.
After seeing many of the Eastern dances and dancers who have been
brought to Western Europe and the United States, I am convinced Uday
Shan-Kar is still the outstanding exponent. I hope to bring him again
for further tours, for I feel the more the American people are exposed
to his performances, the better we shall understand the fine and
delicate art of the East, and the East itself.
_D. A SPANISH LADY_
Although my taste for the dances of Spain had been whetted by my
association with Escudero, I had long wished to present to America the
artist whom I knew was the finest exponent of the feminine dance of the
Iberian peninsula. The task was by no means an easy one, for her first
American venture had been a fiasco. The lady from Spain was anything but
eager to risk another North American venture.
Her name was Encarnacion Lopez. But it was as Argentinita that she was
known to and loved by all lovers of the dance of Spain, and recognized
by them as its outstanding interpreter of our time. Her story will bear
re-telling. My enthusiasm, my utmost admiration for the Spanish dance,
and for the great art of Argentinita is something that is not easy for
me to express. Diaghileff is known to have said with that unequivocation
for which he was noted: “There are two schools of dancing: the Classic
Ballet, which is the foundation of all ballet; and the Spanish school.”
I would have put it differently by saying that Classic Ballet and the
Spanish school are the two types of dancing closest to my heart.
My first view of Argentinita was at New York’s Majestic Theatre, in
1931, when she made her American _début_ in Lew Leslie’s ill-fated
_International Revue_. This performance, coincidentally enough, also
brought forth for his first American appearance, the British dancer,
Anton Dolin, who later also came under my management and who, like
Argentinita, was to become a close personal friend. For Dolin, the
opening night of the _International Revue_ was certainly no very
conspicuous beginning; for Argentinita, however, it was definitely a sad
one. This charming, quiet-voiced lady of Spain knew that she was a great
artist. Thrust into the hurly-burly of an ineptly produced Broadway
revue, where all was shouting and screaming, Argentinita continued her
quiet way and, artist that she was, avoided shouting and screaming her
demands.
I was present at the opening performance. Although she was outwardly
calm, collected, restrained, I could sense the ordeal through which
Argentinita was going. In order to insure proper rhythmic support, she
had brought her own orchestra conductor from Spain. This gentleman was
able to speak little, if any, English. From where I sat I could see the
musicians poring over their parts and could hear them commenting to each
other about the music. Obviously the parts were in bad order and,
equally obviously, there had been little or no rehearsal; and, moreover,
it appeared the music was difficult to read at short notice.
It was one of those strange ironies of fate that ruined something that,
properly handled, should and would have been a triumph. Yet it was not
only the orchestra and the music that were at fault. Argentinita herself
was shockingly presented, if she can honestly be said to have been
presented at all. She made her entrance as a Spanish peasant, in a
Spanish peasant costume which, though correct in every detail, was
devoid of any effect of what the average audience thinks is Spanish. She
was asked to dance in a peasant scene against a fantastic set purporting
to be Spanish, surrounded by a bevy of Broadway showgirls in marvellous
exotic costumes, also purporting to be Iberian, with trains yards in
length, which were no more authentically Spanish, or meant to be, than
were those of the tango danced by that well-known ball-room dancing team
of Moss and Fontana, who came on later in the same scene.
Under such circumstances, success for Argentinita was out of the
question. So bitter was her disappointment that she left the cast and
the company two weeks after the opening. Later she gave a Sunday night
recital in her own repertoire, and although I set to work immediately to
persuade her that there was an audience for her in America, a great,
enthusiastic audience, such were her doubts that it took me six years to
do it. I knew she was a born star, for I recognized, shining in the
tawdry setting of this revue, a vivacious theatre personality.
When Argentinita finally returned to America, in 1938, under my
management, and made her appearance on 13th November of that year, at
the Majestic Theatre, on the same stage where, seven years before, she
had so utterly and tragically failed, this time to enthusiastic cheers
and a highly approving press, she admitted I had been correct in my
judgment and in my insistence that she return.
There is little point in recounting at this time her subsequent triumphs
all over America, for her hold on the public increased with each
appearance, and she is all too close to the memories of contemporary
dance lovers. I have said that Argentinita was a great artist. That will
bear repeating over and over again. Every gesture she made was feminine
and beautiful and, to my mind, she portrayed everything that was lovely
and most desirable. While her castanets may not actually have sung, they
spoke of many lovely things. Argentinita was a symbol of the womanhood
of Spain, warm, rich-blooded, wholesome, and I always felt certain there
were not enough hats in the world, least of all in Spain, to throw at
her feet to pay her the homage that was her due.
Argentinita was born of Spanish parents in Buenos Aires, in 1898, and
taken back to Spain by them when she was four years old. At that early
age she commenced her training in the Spanish dance in all its varied
forms and styles, for she was equally at home in the Spanish Classic
dance as she was in the Gypsy or Flamenco dances. Those who saw the poem
she could make from _las Soleares_ of Andulasia, the basic rhythm of all
Spanish gypsy dances, know how she gave them the magic of a magic land;
or the gay _Alegrias_, performed in the sinuous manner, rich with
contrasts of slow, soft, and energetic movements, with the
characteristic stamping, stomping, sole-tapping, clapping, and
finger-snapping. It was in the _Alegrias_ that Argentinita let her fancy
roam with the slow tempo of the music. The European dance analysts had
noted that here, as also at other times and places, Argentinita danced
to please herself. When the tempo quickened, her mood changed to one of
gaiety and abandon.
It is a difficult matter for me to pin down my memories of this splendid
artist and her work: _las Sevillianas_, the national dance of Seville,
danced by all classes and conditions of people, the Queen of Flamenco
dances; or the _Bulerias_, the most typical of all gypsy dances, light
and gay, the dance of the fiesta.
Argentinita was not only a dancer. She was an actress of the first
order. She had been a member of Martinez Sierra’s interesting and vital
creative theatre in Madrid. She sang _Chansons Populaires_ in a
curiously throaty, plaintive little voice that could, nevertheless, fill
the largest theatre, despite the cameo-like quality of her art, fill
even the Metropolitan Opera House, with the sound, the color, the
atmosphere of Spain.
Dancer of Spain that she was, her repertoire was not by any means
confined to the dance and music and life of the peoples of the Iberian
peninsula. She traveled far afield for her material, through the towns
and villages of South and Central America. Yet she was no mere copyist.
Works and ideas she found were transmuted into terms of the theatre by
means of a subtle alchemy. She had a deep knowledge of the entire
Spanish dance tradition, and knew it all, understood its wide historical
and regional changes. In her regional works, from Spanish folk to the
heart of the Andes, she kept the flavor of the original, but
personalized the dances. About them all was a fundamental honesty;
nothing was done for show. There were no heroics; no athleticism. In
addition to the _Alegrias_, _Sevillianas_, _Fandangos_, _Jotas_ of
Spain, the folk dances and folk songs of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and
the remote places of Latin America and of its Indian villages were hers.
None who ever saw her do it can ever quite obliterate the memory of _El
Huayno_, implicit as it was with the stark dignity and nobility of the
Inca woman, and called by one critic, “the greatest dance of our
generation.”
I have a particularly fond memory of _On the Route to Seville_, in which
a smoothie from the city outwitted and outdid the gypsies in larceny;
and also I remember fondly that nostalgic picture of the Madrid of 1900,
which she called, simply enough, _In Old Madrid_.
As our association developed and continued, I was happy to be able to
extend the scope of her work and bring her from the solitary and
non-theatrical dance recital platform on which, one after the other,
from coast to coast, her journeys were a succession of triumphs, to the
stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Here, with her own
ensemble, chief among which was her exceptionally talented sister, Pilar
Lopez, I placed them as guests with one ballet company or another--with
Leonide Massine in Manuel de Falla’s _The Three-Cornered Hat_ and in
_Capriccio Espangnol_, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, on the choreography of which
she collaborated with Massine.
In addition to these theatre adaptations of the dances of Spain, she
danced in her own dances, both solo and with Pilar Lopez. She trained
and developed excellent men, notably José Greco and Manolo Vargas. I am
especially happy in having been instrumental in bringing to the stage
two of her most interesting theatrical creations. One was the ballet she
staged to de Falla’s _El Amor Brujo_, which I produced for her. The
other was the Garcia Lorca _El Café de Chinitas_. Argentinita had been a
devoted friend of the martyred Loyalist poet, and to bring his work to
the American stage was a project close to her heart and a real labor of
love. Argentinita belonged to a close little circle of scholars, poets,
and composers, which included Martinez Sierra, Jacinto Benavente, and
the extraordinarily brilliant, genius-touched Garcia Lorca.
The production of _El Café de Chinitas_ was made possible during a
Spanish festival I gave, one spring, at the Metropolitan Opera House.
For this festival I engaged José Iturbi to conduct a large orchestra
composed of members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Argentinita
had succeeded in interesting the Marquis de Cuevas in the project. For
_El Café de Chinitas_ the Marquis commissioned settings and costumes
from Salvador Dali. The result was one of the most effective and best
considered works for the theatre emanating from Dali’s brush. Dali, like
Argentinita, had been a friend of the martyred patriot-poet-composer.
His profounder emotions touched, Dali designed as effective a setting as
the Metropolitan Opera House has seen. The first of the two scenes was a
tremendously high wall on which hung literally hundreds of guitars, a
“graveyard of guitars,” as Dali phrased it; while the second scene, the
_Café de Chinitas_ itself, revealed the heroic torso of a female dancer
with her arms upstretched in what could be interpreted as an attitude of
the dance, or, if one chose, as a crucifixion. From where the hands held
the castanets there dripped blood, as though the hands had been pierced.
In terms of symbols, this was Dali’s representation of the crucifixion
of his country by hideous civil war. This was Argentinita’s last
production, and one of her happiest creations.
A victim of cancer, Argentinita died in New York on 24th September,
1945. I was at the hospital at the end, together with my friend and
hers, Anton Dolin. Her doctors had long prescribed complete rest for her
and special care. But her life was the dance, and stop she could not.
Heroically she ignored her illness. If there was one thing about her
more conspicuous than another, it was her tiny, dainty, slippered feet.
No longer will they dart delicately into the lovely positions on the
floor.
In Argentinita there was never either bitterness or unkindness to any
one. I have seen, at first hand, Argentinita’s encouragement and
unstinted help to others, and to lesser dancers. The success of others,
whether it was the artists in her own programmes, or elsewhere, was a
joy to her; nothing but the best was good enough. Her sister, Pilar
Lopez, who survives her and who today dances with great success in
Europe, carrying on her sister’s work, is a magnificent dancer. When
the two sisters danced together, everything that could be done to make
Pilar shine more brilliantly was done; and that, too, was the work of
Argentinita. Her loyalty to me was something of which I am very proud.
Above all, it was the dignity and charm of the woman that played a great
part in the superb image of the artist who was known as Argentinita.
_E. A TERPSICHOREAN ANTHROPOLOGIST_
The mixture of dance and song and anthropology, with a firm accent on
sex, that struck a new note in the dance theatre, hailed from Chicago.
Her name is Katherine Dunham. She is a dynamo of energy; she is elusive;
she is unpredictable. She is a quite superb combination of exoticism and
intellectuality.
Daughter of a French-Canadian and an American Negro, Katherine was born
in Joliet, Illinois, in 1914. Her theatrical experience has ranged from
art museums to night clubs, from Broadway to London’s West End, to the
_Théâtre des Champs Elysées_ in Paris, to European triumphs. Her early
life was spent and her first dancing was done in Chicago. She flashed
across the American entertainment world comet-like. More recently she
has confined her activities almost exclusively to England and Europe.
I had no part in her beginnings. By the time I undertook to manage her,
she had assembled her own company of Negro dancers and had oscillated
between the rarefied atmosphere of women’s clubs and concert halls, on
the one hand, to night clubs and road houses, on the other. The
atmosphere of the latter was both smoky and rowdy. Katherine Dunham, I
suspect, is something of a split personality, so far as her art is
concerned. Possessor of a fine mind, it would seem to have been one
frequently in turmoil. On the one side, there is a keen intellectual
side to it, evidenced by both a Bachelor of Philosophy and a Master of
Arts degree from the University of Chicago, two Rosenwald Fellowships,
and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her Masters degree is in anthropology.
These studies she pursued, as I have said, on the one hand. On the
other, she studied and practiced the dance with an equal fierceness.
Her intellectual pursuits have been concerned, for the most part, with
anthropological researches into the Negro dance. Her first choreographic
venture was her collaboration with Ruth Page, in Chicago, in _La
Guiablesse_, a ballet on a Martinique theme, with a score based on
Martinique folk melodies by the American composer, William Grant Still,
a work with an all-Negro cast, seen both at the Century of Progress
Exhibition and the Chicago Opera House, in 1933. Dunham became active in
the Federal Dance Theatre, and its Chicago director. It was when she was
doing the dances for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union
depression-time revue, _Pins and Needles_, that she tried a Sunday dance
concert in New York at the Forty-eighth Street Theatre. So successful
was it that it was repeated every Sunday for three months.
Turning to the theatre, she added acting and singing to dancing and
choreography, both on the stage and in films, appearing as both actress
and singer in _Cabin in the Sky_. She intrigued me, both by the quality
of her work, her exoticism, and her loyalty to her little troupe, for
the members of which she felt herself responsible. I first met her while
she was appearing at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, in San Francisco. She was
closing her engagement. She was down and out, trying to keep her group
together. I arranged for an audition and, after seeing her with her
group, undertook to see what could be done. Present with me at this
audition were Agnes de Mille, then in San Francisco rehearsing with the
Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo what was to become her first choreographic
triumph, _Rodeo_, together with Alexandra Danilova and Frederick
Franklin.
My idea in taking over her management was to try to help her transform
her concert pieces into revue material, suitable not only to the
country’s concert halls, but also to the theatre of Broadway and those
road theatres that were becoming increasingly unoccupied because of the
paucity of productions to keep them open. Certain purely theatrical
elements were added, including some singers, one of them being a Cuban
tenor; and, to supplement her native percussion players, a jazz group,
recruited from veterans of the famous “Dixieland Band.”
We called the entertainment the _Tropical Revue_. The _Tropical Revue_
was an immediate success at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York and,
thanks to some quick work, I was able to secure additional time at the
theatre and to extend the run to six weeks. This set up some sort of
record for an entertainment of the kind. As an entertainment form it
rested somewhere between revue and recital. Miss Dunham herself had
three outstanding numbers. These were her own impressions of what she
called different “hot” styles. These were responsible for some of the
heat that brought on the sizzling of the scenery to which the critics
referred. The first of her numbers was _Bahiana_, a limpid and languid
impression of Brazil; then _Shore Excursion_, a contrasting piece, fast,
hot, tough, and Cuban. The third was _Barrelhouse_, an old stand-by of
hers, straight out of Chicago’s Jungletown.
_Tropical Revue_, during its two years under my management, was in an
almost perpetual state of flux. It was revised and revised, and revised
again. As the tours proceeded, Dunham did less and less dancing and more
and more impersonation. But while her “bumps” grew more discreet, there
was no lessening of the heat. Dunham’s choreography was best in
theatricalized West Indian and Latin American folk dances, some of which
approached full-scale ballets. The best of these, in my opinion, was
_L’Ag’ya_, a three-scened work, Martinique at core, the high light of
which was the “_ag’ya_,” a kicking dance. Here she was able to put to
excellent use authentic Afro-Caribbean steps, and in the overall
choreographic style, I would not feel it unfair to say that Dunham’s
style had been considerably influenced by the Chicago choreographer and
dancer, Ruth Page, with whom Dunham had collaborated early in her
career.
It did not take me long to discover the public was more interested in
sizzling scenery than it was in anthropology, at least in the theatre.
Since the _Tropical Revue_ was fairly highly budgeted, it was necessary
for us, in order to attract the public, to emphasize sex over
anthropology. Dunham, with a shrewd eye to publicity, oscillated between
emphasis first on one and then on the other; her fingers were in
everything. In addition to running the company, dancing, singing,
revising, she lectured, carried on an unending correspondence by letter
and by wire, entertained lavishly, and added considerably, I am sure, to
the profits of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Columns
were written about her, and fulsome essays, a good deal of which was
balderdash.
The handling of this tour presented its own special set of problems. Not
the least of these was the constantly recurring one of housing. We have
come a long way in the United States in disposing of Jim Crow; but there
is still a great deal to be done. Hotel accommodations for the artists
of the _Tropical Revue_ were a continual source of worry. One Pacific
Coast city was impossible. When, after days of fruitless searching, our
representative thought he had been able to install them in a neighboring
town, the Chinese owner of the hotel, on learning his guests were not
white, canceled the reservations.
A certain midwestern city was another trouble spot, where, in one of the
city’s leading hostelries, the employees threatened to strike because of
the presence there of some of the principal artists. This was averted by
some quick work on the part of our staff. It should be noted, too, that
these unfortunate difficulties were all in cities north of what we hoped
was the non-existent Mason and Dixon Line.
Miss Dunham, quite naturally, was disturbed and exercised by this
discrimination. In order to avoid this kind of unpleasantness, I had
tried to restrict the bookings to northern cities. However, it became
necessary to play an engagement in a southern border city. The results
were not happy. At the time of making the booking, I did not realize
that in this border state segregation was practiced in its Municipal
Auditorium.
The house was sold out on the opening night. Owing to wartime
transportation difficulties, the company was late in arriving. Just
before the delayed curtain’s rise, Miss Dunham requested four seats for
some of her local friends. She was asked by the manager of the
Auditorium if they were colored. Miss Dunham replied that they were;
whereupon the manager offered to place chairs for them in the balcony,
since colored persons were not permitted in the orchestra stalls. Miss
Dunham protested, and objected to her friends being seated other than in
the orchestra. The fact was there were no seats available in the stalls,
since the house was sold out. However, had it not been for the
segregation rule, four extra chairs could have been placed in the boxes.
The performance was enthusiastically received, with repeated curtain
calls at its close. Miss Dunham responded with a speech. She thanked the
audience for its appreciation and its warm response. Then, smarting
under the accumulated pressures of discrimination throughout the tour,
climaxed by the incident involving her friends, she paused, and added:
“This is good-bye. I shall not appear here again until people like me
can sit with people like you. Good-bye, and God bless you--and you may
need it.”