LA OTERO
Photograph: W. & D. Downey
no inexorable training. She never pretended to any brilliancy of execution that was beyond her powers. Her manner was simple and unaffected. Without making any very strenuous efforts she glided through a few simple movements that showed off to perfection her supple and well-proportioned figure. She achieved fame less by the technique of her dancing than by her character, her allure, the distinction of her intriguing and exotic personality.
La Tortajada is a figure well known both in London and in America. Her style is not representative of the purest type of Spanish dancing, as it is apt to be infected with the atmosphere of the music-hall. Her personality, moreover, is far less interesting than that of La Carmencita. She was born in Granada, and her aim is to bring the warmth and colour of the sun of meridional Spain into her dancing—to dance, in fact, as she expressed it, “la danse ensoleillée.”
“America,” she says in a naïve account of her career, “has fêted me and showered dollars on me by the handful. Millionaires in particular have given me a great ‘réclame,’ among them Pierpont Morgan, Astor and Vanderbilt. The latter gave me a thousand dollars to dance one Christmas Day. Another American, Mr Taft, the future President, made a bet that I was taller than another woman well known to the public. He was at the pains of coming himself to measure me, and having won the five thousand dollars, he at once purchased a magnificent piece of jewellery with them which he offered to me. If the millionaires fêted me, so also did the poorest citizens of the Republic, the humble Sioux, who are still to be found in some of the wilder regions. While making a motor tour in the district of the immense pine forests for the benefit of my health, I fell in with some of these fine fellows and the idea suddenly occurred to me that I would dance specially for them. My husband and I improvised a stage and thereupon I danced my most voluptuous flamenca, which at first terrified but soon afterwards delighted them. I was royally rewarded, for the chief made me a present of some gold dust and a purse fashioned out of serpent’s skin.... But the most curious spectators that I have known were three thousand Zulus whom I came across when motoring back from Johannesburg. Unlike the Sioux, they did not look on at my dance in silent admiration. No sooner had I begun to dance than the Zulus commenced to caper about all round me. Nothing could have been more picturesque, and at the same time more ludicrous, than the sight of a white woman in a mantilla appearing as mistress of the revels in a negro orgy!”
Guerrero is perhaps a more impassioned dancer than La Tortajada, but she has strayed even further from the purity of the Spanish dance. At the Marigny Theatre in Paris, she has this summer been dancing a new and startling dance called the Tango. It is a curious mixture of composure and frenzy, and at first acquaintance seems full of complications. Her rendering of it is said to take away the breath of the English and American tourists who fill the popular music-hall among the chestnuts of the Champs Elysée.
But the performances of these exponents of Spanish dancing only serve to show how swiftly it degenerates as soon as it leaves its native atmosphere. Even in the peninsula itself the dance seems to lose its essential character when it is performed in one of those palatial cosmopolitan music-halls, by the erection of which Spain is endeavouring to convince the world of its ability to keep abreast of the march of progress. To see the real classic dancing of an elder Spain, it is necessary to search among the shabby streets of the poorer quarters of Seville or Barcelona. There you may perchance discover some stifling, exuberant little café or theatre of the people, in which, if fortune favours you, you may find a dancer of talent, even of genius. I remember such an one in a little café chantant in Barcelona, no bigger and scarcely less unfurnished than a railway station waiting-room. The dancer appeared to be on the most intimate terms with the occupants of the stalls, and could at request lampoon the particular foibles of each habitué in copletas that were barbed with the cruellest Iberian irony. But her dancing had a brilliance, a fire, an abandon, and even a technical excellence, which I have never seen equalled in the displays of those artists whose names are known throughout Europe. It was at once
