Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-zzh7m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T01:23:37.976Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Touring History: Tórtola Valencia Between Europe and the Americas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2012

Michelle Clayton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1907, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío published the collection El canto errante [The Wandering Song], containing a poem entitled “La bailarina de los pies desnudos” [“The Barefoot Dancer”]. The title leads the reader to anticipate an aesthetic of lightness and simplicity, yet the poem is weighted down by its many cultural references: at least one per line, and barely harmonizing amongst themselves. Its space is heavily perfumed, thickly ornamented, animated by the movements of a dancer who invokes different cultural references and plastic forms with each extended limb, each trembling body part. At first sight sinuously seductive, this central figure unravels into a welter of fragments and contradictions: both animal and divine, eroticized and chaste, a lunar deity (Selene) and a literary character (Anactoria), a “constellation of examples and of objects” (constelada de casos y de cosas) whose body, as the line suggests, barely contains its referential chaos.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , Summer 2012 , pp. 29 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Albright, Ann Cooper. 2007. Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Amor y Vázquez, José. 1987. “Noticias de poetas en danza (o de Valencia [Tórtola] a Valencia [Guillermo].” Las relaciones literarias entre España e Iberoamérica, 331–338. Madrid: Universidad Complutense.Google Scholar
Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Brandstetter, Gabriele. 1995. TanzLektüren. Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde. Frankfurt: Fischer.Google Scholar
Carter, Alexandra. 2005. “London 1908: A Synchronic View of Dance History.” Dance Research 23(1): 36–50.Google Scholar
Caulfield, Carlota. 1999. “Carmen Tórtola Valencia (1882–1955)”. Corner Magazine #2: n.p. http://www.cornermag.org/corner02/page09.htm.Google Scholar
Colmeiro, Jose F. 2002. “Exorcising Exoticism: Carmen and the Construction of Oriental Spain.” Comparative Literature 54(2): 127–144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawford Flitch, J.E. 1912. Modern Dancing and Dancers. Philadelphia: Lippincott.Google Scholar
Desmond, Jane. 1991. “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis's ‘Radha’ of 1906.” Signs 17(1): 28–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Emmanuel, Maurice. 1896. La danse grecque antique d'après les monuments figurés. Paris: Hachette.Google Scholar
Garland, Iris. 1995. “Modernist Values and Historical Neglect: The Case of Tórtola Valencia.” In Border Tensions: Dance and Discourse, comp. Adshead-Lansdale, Janet and Jones, Chris, 115–123. Dept. of Dance Studies, University of Surrey.Google Scholar
Garland, Iris. 1997. “Early Modern Dance in Spain: Tórtola Valencia, Dancer of the Historical Intuition.” Dance Research Journal 29(2): 1–22.Google Scholar
Garland, Iris. 1999a. “El enmascaramiento de Tórtola Valencia: Autoexilio feminista de una bailarina de la Belle Epoque,” trans. Kirschner, Teresa J. In Exilios femeninos, ed. Domínguez, Pilar Cuder, 167–174. Huelva, Spain: Universidad de Huelva.Google Scholar
Garland, Iris. 1999b. “Modernismo and the Dancer: Tórtola Valencia.” Corner Magazine #2: n.p. http://www.cornermag.org/corner02/page08.htm.Google Scholar
Garland, Iris. 1999c. “Tórtola Valencia and the Mexican Critics (1918).” In Continents in Movement: The Meeting of Cultures in Dance History, ed. Tercio, Daniel, 111–117. Lisbon: Universidad Técnica de Lisboa.Google Scholar
Gunning, Tom. 2006a. “The Birth of Film Out of the Spirit of Modernity.” In Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, ed. Perry, Ted, 13–40. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Gunning, Tom. 2006b. “Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows.” In Cinema and Modernity, ed. Pomerance, Murray, 297–315. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Hindson, Catherine. 2007. Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siecle Popular Stages of London and Paris. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Jowitt, Deborah. 1988. Time and the Dancing Image. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Koritz, Amy. 1994. “Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan's “The Vision of Salome.” Theater Journal 46: 63–78.Google Scholar
Kushigian, Julia A. 1991. Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Larco Herrera, Rafael. 1947. Memorias. Lima: Rimac.Google Scholar
Manning, Susan. 1997. “The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze.” In Meaning in Motion, ed. Desmond, Jane, 153–166. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Molloy, Sylvia. 2000. “Of Queens and Castanets: Hispanidad, Orientalism, and Sexual Difference.” In Queer Diasporas, eds. Patton, Cindy and Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno, 105–21. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Preston, Carrie. Modernism's Mythic Pose. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Queralt, María Pilar. 2005. Tórtola Valencia: Una mujer entre sombras. Barcelona: Lumen.Google Scholar
Solrac, Odelot. 1982. Tórtola Valencia and Her Times. New York: Vantage.Google Scholar
Srinivasan, Priya. 2007. “The Bodies Beneath the Smoke, or What's Behind the Cigarette Poster? Unearthing Kinaesthetic Connections in American Dance History.” Discourses in Dance 4(1): 7–48.Google Scholar