Dancing Argentine Modernity: Imagined Indigenous Bodies on the Buenos Aires Concert Stage (1915–1966)

Abstract

This article argues that the unrealized balletCaaporá(1915), conceived for choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, and Oscar Araiz'sLa consagración de la primavera(1966,The Rite of Spring) fundamentally shaped the establishment and reimagination of concert dance as a site of modernity in Argentina. Both works danced modernity through imagined pre-Columbian indigenous myths choreographed in Euro-American concert dance forms. In Argentina, “unmarked” ballet and modern dance forms signaled a universalized cultural advancement aligned with the West, while indigenous myths staged “marked” Latin American origins that held racial difference at a distance from the modern present.CaaporáandConsagraciónnegotiated the “marked” and the “unmarked” toward different ends. WhileCaaporástrove to “Argentinize” European ballet at the turn of the century,Consagraciónmarked the move to claim concert dance as Argentine at midcentury. By focusing on the role of indigenism in these two works, this article contributes to scholarship on the modernist negotiation of the marked and unmarked in Latin American concert dance as a strategy for staging—and transcending—the nation.

Subverting Precariousness: Work, History, and Aesthetics in Contemporary Dance in Buenos Aires

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Dance That “Suggested Nothing but Itself”: Josephine Baker and Abstraction

“…In contrast to the old model, in which dance modernism was an American and German invention rooted in those nations' nationalistic interests, transnationalism has emerged as a potent concept to help define what made dance modern in the 1920s and 1930s. Several scholars examine the role of specific individuals who traversed geographic and cultural boundaries to innovate new artistic concepts (Clayton 2012;Purkayastha 2014;Reynoso 2014;Fortuna 2016;Wilcox 2019). 3 I am indebted to Rebecca Chaleff for pointing me toward (Foster 2002) and (Casel 2016). aesthetic must include how she developed principles of abstraction not as something to fuse with an Africanist aesthetic, but rather as something developed from her training and experience, which was predominantly in African American theater and dance.…”