Gerardo Atienza y María Brusilovskaya con sus discípulas by Hipólito Hidalgo de Caviedes. 1934. Oil on panel. 207 x 170 cm. Private collection.
Ballets Espagnols de la Argentina by Carlos Sáenz de Tejada. 1927 Mechanical printing on paper, 128 x 98 cm. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
The year 1925 marked the beginning of a new age in the development of the Spanish dance.
Declared as insolvent, the Teatro Real closed its doors, which resulted in the disappearance of its body of dancers and condemned the classical dance to a difficult survival, sheltered in the Liceo and some private academies.
That very same year, the ballet version of Falla’s El amor brujo was premiered in Paris, starring Antonia Marcé, laArgentina, who, as a result of the great success, founded her Ballets Espagnols, following a similar strategy to Diaghilev’s, although “a la española”. With it she toured Europe, America and Asia at the end of the 1920s, presenting a repertoire of ballets in which literate pioneers, composers and Spanish painters collaborated. In a similar way, Vicente Escudero promoted in Paris different initiatives that combined flamenco with the most rabid vanguard, and Teresina Boronat performed extensive international tours with numbers of classical ballet, folklore and Spanish dance.
With the arrival of the Second Republic, the new dance policy recognized since the beginning its importance in the diffusion of the Spanish culture both inside and outside our frontiers. Antonia Mercé, la Argentina, was awarded in 1931 with the “Lazo de la Orden de Isabel la Católica”, first honour of the new regime; and in 1933 María Esparza was named director of the ephemeral Ballet del Teatro Lírico Nacional.
