Sketch for Bacchanale by Salvador Dalí, 1939. Acrylic on wood, 50 x 60 x 30 cm. Museo Nacional del Teatro, Almagro.
Poster for Don Lindo de Almería of La Paloma Azul by Ramón Gaya, México, 1940. Private collection.
The complex interdisciplinary network woven by intellectuals and artists around the world of dance during the Edad de Plata survived in different forms after the outburst of the war. The military conflict provoked a “war dance” to emerge, formed by short pieces, folklore-like and strong propagandistic meaning. This type of dance constituted the base of the repertoire of groups like the Guerrillas del Teatro, Eresoinka and the Cobla Barcelona, and reached, thanks to the latter and a group of Spanish dances of Agapito Marazuela, to the Spanish pavilion of the Paris International Exhibition in 1937. On the rebels’ front, with the creation of the Coros y Danzas, dependents on the Sección Femenina of Falange Española, started a process of appropriation of the folklore extended during the first Francoist period.
On July 18th of 1936, while the coup-d’état took place, la Argentinita died suddenly in Bayonne. She was the first of the great losses of the protagonists of the Edad de Plata that, during the conflict, left Spain. The cartography of exile includes milestones related to the dance in which intervened dancers, poets and sheltered painters, like La Paloma Azul in Mexico, the Ballet Society in New York, the Soviet dancing groups or the repertoire of certain companies in Europe and Latin America. Although some of these artists would die during their exile, as it happened to la Argentinita in New York in 1945, others returned to the stages of Francoism. At the same time these veteran interprets and choreographers became referents, it came into play a young generation that would become the heir of the following decades of that brilliant dancing legacy.
