An elaborate series of advances, turns, meetings and passings prepares the torero to acknowledge that he notices the girl. (Mr. Bernard Shaw was not the original discoverer of feminine initiative in man-and-woman relations.) He looks at her and is delighted. The music changes, and the second movement, la mimica, begins. He will spread his capa for her to walk over; but first he must flourish it through a couple of the movements familiar to patrons of the corrida. A veronica—“Olé!” roars the crowd, whose memory instantly correlates with the writhing cape the vision of a furious bull. A farol throws the brilliantly coloured cloth like a huge flower high in the air: a suerte de capa always magnificent, one of the ever-recurring flashes of surprise that make the corrida irresistible despite its faults. In consecutive movement the capa opens and settles fanlike before the girl, the boy kneeling as she passes. Rising, he tosses, his cap for her to step on. A touch of realism, this! Andalusian usage permits this compliment, with the spoken wish that God may bless the señorita’s mother. The second copla draws to a close with the boy’s pantomime merging into dance step as he becomes more attracted to the girl. She is now evading, alluring, and reproving, while her movements insensibly succumb more and more to the dance music which has replaced the promenade tempo of the first part. The third copla is the dance—el baile; capa, fan and manton are discarded for castanets. The steps are of the Seguidillas type; the number ends with the incredibly sudden transformation of a series of rapid turns into a group as motionless as statuary. This abrupt stop is a characteristic of Spanish dancing in general that always has been commented on, and approvingly, by its non-Spanish observers.
Las Malagueñas also employs mantilla and fan. This sprightly member of the Seguidillas family has no elements peculiar to itself, yet its insistent use of little steps adapts it to rapid foot-work. Manchegas is of the
same nature. The two are often performed immediately after dances of less action, for the sake of variety.
“The Fandango inflames, the Bolero intoxicates,” wrote an enthusiast of other days. And in respect to the latter the truth of his observation may be proved, since the Bolero is still with us, and always intoxicates every one of its spectators that is not deaf and blind.
Its composition is attributed to Cerezo, a famous dancer of the early part of the eighteenth century. Material for speculation is furnished by one of its steps in particular, the cuarta, identical with the ballet’s entrechat-quatre. The invention of the entrechat is credited to the French dancer Camargo, who was not born until after the advent of the Bolero. The question is: Did the Bolero take the cuarta from Camargo, or did she, a progressive in her day, merely invent the name “entrechat” and apply it to a “lifted” cuarta? Certain it is that it fits its requirements in the Bolero like a key in its lock. It is used in a passage dedicated to brilliancy, to which motive this twinkling, gravity-defying step is suited above almost all others. As rendered by the woman, it is dainty, as in the French ballet. But the Spanish man treats it in a manner that puts it into a category by itself, and transforms it from a little step to an evolution that seems suddenly to occupy the entire stage.