Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

Her dance begins as this response, almost this opposition to the music. Sinew of the north confronts the fluid south. Two dominant forms embrace in warfare: a music, limned like prayer, rhythmed like heartbeat, and this fierce coldness on a woman’s body, which is the Word of Castile. The dancer is a column, articulate of spirit: a live plasticity: with the moods of eye and waving hand flung like a largess to our sense.

There is a pause. The two dominants of the dance (the north and the south) fall momently apart and reveal a third. It is the personality of the dancer herself. She is woman: very woman. She is large, almost heavy. Her arms are full rounded; her head is poised; her bare shoulders are a magnificent molding of firm flesh. From the waist, the skirt thrusts almost at right angles. It is a cascade of gold down to the ankles; and as the dancer whirls it flares out wide, revealing the gray stockinged legs which are a minor almost girlish note within the sumptuous dress. Her feet stamp; the skirt flows; the torso, lashed in purple, stands heroically still, its silence an articulation not alone of the tempest within but of the will to subdue it. The arms float languidly to the head. The castanets click their dry commentary. Purring, shrilling, silent, they are a gloss subtle as Talmud page, as Arabesque, upon this whirl of sculpted fire which is the dance of Spain.

The castanet came, probably, with the gypsy from the ruined culture of Byzance. It was known to the Greeks and Romans. In the hands of the gitana, it is—as perhaps it was in the Dionysian rites—a heightened bloodbeat to the music: simple, single dimensioned, metronomic. Here it is an instrument subtle as a voice. It is a running, rhyming prose. Like the arabesque—a decoration evolved from the written language—it retains an intellectual power. The line and music of the castanets are apart from the dance. While the arms flow like birds wheeling, while the body becomes a throat of song, here is analysis forever present.

The action in the dance is drama. The bailarina moves in a tiny square. She draws intensity from subtle signals of torso, shoulder, limb, hand: this intensity she transposes to an undulous swing carrying her now far about the platform. She is horizontal and relaxed. She turns her naked shoulders forward; the castanets click almost silently beside her hips that roll in a slow ruminance. She faces about; her caress comes full and forward. The music tears with its down cadence against this mellow mother. Plaint and passion weave a subtle net that draws her forward (the castanets are still). Suddenly, she is held in rigor. The fertile mother of the south is sacrificed to the harsh north. The gorgeous breast, the hips, the arms like songs of love, are tortured in a vise of passionate control. She is the drama of women giving up their sons to the Reconquest, giving the man of their marriage bed to battle with the Moor.... But the mood does not last. Castanets trip lightly. She dances fluidly, widely; her heels strike high; her golden skirt rises and frees her legs. The castanets are become as the chatter of children. From the new relaxation of delight wells more energy, and comes again the tragic transformation. With the emotion, rises the ruthless will locking at last this pleasaunce in its hostile grip. The music is now a battle. Song, body, castanets fuse in the war of passion and will, of nature and of reason breaking on each other. And above this symphony, the dancer’s face is silence.

So do all the motions of this drama converge into a plastic movelessness. The dance itself is not drama; is less kin to the dances of Europe than to the sculpture of Egypt. One thinks of the stones of the Nile in whose unsubtle substance live flame and intricate vision. One thinks of the Maya reliefs of Yucatan whose myriad planes twine to harmonious flatness.

. . . . . .

Since the dance is a true classic art, the need of personal genius to express it is reduced. The true genius here is the tradition. Spain dances. Unlike the other dances of modern Europe, the dance of Andalusia is a norm: and the true dancer is a normal woman.

The good bailarina conforms strictly to the type of the good andaluza. She is handsomely stout, with broad pelvis, full-developed breast, strong, regular features. She lacks sensual erethism. She is indeed the matron, rather than the prostitute. And the matron is fitted for the classic dance, precisely because of its normality, because it has been purged of the romantic, the brilliant, the superficially sensual—the accidental. A “romantic” Andalusian dance is nonsense.[9]

The classic bailarina is, then, a quiet woman. Her body is splendid without obvious incitements. Her costume is lovely in form and color, but it is too heavy and too complete to be sexually arousing. She conforms to an ideal of plastic motion in which all the romantic elements of the dance—lust, madness, nakedness—are sublimated into social symbols: love, prayer, vision, sacrifice. And all her movements (again unlike the dances of Europe) merge into an almost static mold that has the ultimate finality of sculpture.

The true Andalusian dance is solitary; and except in the special case of the cuadro flamenco it is an æsthetic error for more than a single dancer to occupy the stage. The true Andalusian dancer (with the same exception) is a woman. The true Andalusian audience is a man. The relation, however, is not sexual, save perhaps in a remote Freudian sense: it is matriarchal. And this too is normal, since psychologically, Spain is matriarchal. The dancer is mother, teacher, priestess. She holds the stage alone, and smiles on the men who sit beyond the music. This smile is a physical caress, reticent, unconsciously restrained like the caress of a mother. It must win her men, else her ultimate word as teacher and as priestess of Spain’s mystery will go for naught. The men, with the brutal candor of the Spaniard (and of the child) will turn from her and make a clamor of talk to drown her out. But the true andaluza wins her men; and gives her message which is the message of all Spain and Spain herself: this quickened fusion of many hostile worlds into a single Beauty.