La Argentina

Who was La Argentina?

Antonia Mercé y Luque, stage name La Argentina, was a dancer known for her creation of the neoclassical style of Spanish dance as a theatrical art. She was one of the major influences on Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno.

It is given to few artists to incarnate in their art, at a given epoch, the distinct characteristics of their race and its conception of the beautiful, and this, in a manner so in complete and significant that their names get identified with a peculiar way of living and the story of their life becomes a page of history. It is to one such artist representative of her art, of her country, of her age that this short study is consecrated. The recent unexpected renaissance of Spanish dancing, an art whose creative power seemed to have been exhausted, is due primarily to the singular genius of one dancer, La Argentina. Alone she has epitomized and regenerated a form long cheapened and falsified by the music-hall gypsies turned out wholesale in Seville. And her indescribable success has loosened a new onslaught of Spanish dancing, the oldest and noblest of European exotics."