Vicente Escudero
Who is Vicente Escudero?
Vicente Escudero Urive was born in Valladolid on 27 October 1888 into a humble family; his father worked as a shoemaker. He trained in an almost entirely self-taught way while working in graphic arts workshops, and grew up surrounded by Roma culture to the point of considering himself a “gitano by adoption,” claiming, alongside his Castilian ancestry, a share of Roma blood. Out of that dual heritage came a refined, sober and almost theoretical style of dance, far removed from superfluous ornament and centered on the purity of male movement.
Career
He made his official debut in 1920 at the Théâtre Olympia in Paris and lived his most brilliant artistic period between 1929 and 1936, touring the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Cuba, North Africa and more than twenty countries across more than sixty cities. He danced alongside La Argentina in “El amor brujo” in one of the most celebrated moments of his career, and always preferred improvisation on stage to the mechanical repetition of a fixed choreography. He retired from the stage in 1966, though he continued giving recitals in Barcelona in his final years.
In 1974, the Spanish state itself paid him tribute at the Teatro Monumental in Madrid, honoring a career that had made him an essential reference point for male dance.
Style
He championed an austere and virile flamenco, built on footwork capable of producing varied sounds without the need for metal fittings added to the shoes, and rejected any decorative concession that did not arise from the logic of the movement itself.
Legacy
Besides being a bailaor he was a painter, writer and occasional actor and cantaor, and set down his thinking on dance in books such as “Mi baile,” “Pintura que baila” and his celebrated “Decálogo del Baile Flamenco.” He received the Medalla de Oro de Valladolid, a city that also dedicated a street and two statues to him. He died in Barcelona on 4 December 1980, regarded as one of the great intellectual renovators of twentieth-century flamenco dance.