La Argentina
Who is La Argentina?
Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, was born in Buenos Aires in 1890, the daughter of Spanish parents who were teachers and lead dancers at the Teatro Real de Madrid. She was raised in Spain from the age of six, training directly with her own parents, and made her professional debut at fourteen at the Teatro Romea in Madrid, after which she performed in other theaters in the capital such as the Apolo, the Príncipe Alfonso and the Sala Imperio, this last one alongside Raquel Meller and Tórtola Valencia.
Career
In 1911 she moved to Paris, the starting point of an international career that took her, between 1914 and 1916, on tour through Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Russia, and afterward across the Americas: Buenos Aires, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba and New York. It was in this last city that, in 1916, she premiered Granados’s “Goyescas” at the Maxine Elliott’s Theatre. In May 1929 she founded, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, the first Spanish ballet in history, and in 1933 she gave a solo recital at the Paris Opera, something no other dancer had done there until then. She shared the stage with bailaores such as Faíco, Antonio “el de Bilbao,” Vicente Escudero, Miguel Molina and Pastora Imperio, and had Manuel de Falla himself as her musical advisor.
Style
She developed a refined style that combined elements of classical ballet with traditional Iberian forms, specializing in zapateado, tangos and alegrías, as well as in dance interpretations of works by Albéniz, Granados and Falla; her version of “El amor brujo,” premiered in 1925 at the Théâtre Trianon Lyrique and staged again in Madrid in 1935 and in Paris in 1936, became one of her most remembered creations. She traveled to Granada to study the Roma dances of the Sacromonte up close, and came to be known as “the queen of the castanets” for her mastery of that instrument.
Legacy
She received the first decoration awarded by the Second Spanish Republic, in 1931, from the hands of Manuel Azaña, as well as the French Légion d’Honneur. She died of a heart attack in Bayonne, France, on 18 July 1936. The Paris Opera still holds costumes and personal items of hers, and both Paris and Madrid paid her posthumous tributes in the following decades, in recognition of a decisive contribution to twentieth-century Spanish dance.