Antonio ‘El Bailarín’: genius, scandal and a forbidden interview | Culture | EUROtoday

The button is activated play and Antonio’s voice The Dancer It sounds already worn out, though each phrase has the delight of the dance genius who didn’t want surnames to attain glory. “I retired from my professional career in the city of Sapporo, Japan, in 1978,” he’s heard saying over the grainy sound of an previous cassette tape. It is the eighties of the twentieth century and it’s from then on that the unrepeatable artist declines and the character with a scandalous social life emerges, the meat of the primary sensational packages on black and white tv that was drawn to the incipient jet set Marbella and the futility of Spanish aristocratic life.

It is exactly in his home on the Costa del Sol, named jackhammerthe place Antonio, who had been every little thing within the performing arts and cinema between the 40s and seventies of the final century, now retired, grants a protracted interview to a journalist, Santi Arriazu, which marked the ultimate decline of a fable. “The management he made of the last years of his life was inversely proportional to the precision with which he had led his professional career. When the stage lights went out, the spotlights on the sets came on.” It is defined by filmmaker Paco Ortiz, director of the documentary Antonio, the dancer from Spainwhich premieres this Thursday in Seville, the artist’s hometown.

The movie, which covers the superb biography of Antonio Ruiz Soler, is crossed by the voice of the dance genius himself within the recordings of this interview that the journalist Santi Arriazu carried out with him between 1983 and 1984 for a well known gossip journal and that, as a result of scandal of his statements, he was judicially seized following a grievance from the Casa de Alba. “I would only love, I loved and I will love one person, which was Cayetana. And I have lived with her one of the most beautiful, long, exciting and fruitful idylls that a person can live,” Antonio says at one level within the recording in reference to the Duchess of Alba, who was the fuse that lit the controversy that your complete nation talked about for months.

Once the obstacles with justice have been overcome, these interviews have been revealed in a biographical guide signed by the journalist himself, however the recordings made on greater than a dozen cassette tapes that the filmmaker Paco Ortiz “considered lost” had by no means been recovered. “The surprise was when, after many inquiries, I located Santi Arriazu and he told me that he keeps them and that he lives in an area of ​​the coast of Huelva very close to our own work environment.” This unpublished sound gem then turns into the plot line of the movie, Antonio’s story instructed by Antonio, in an audiovisual work that goals to focus on a determine “who has not existed again, nor existed before” within the projection of Spanish dance on the planet. “Antonio would be something like today’s Rosalía; the global phenomenon that always risks and triumphs. He changes his register and triumphs again,” says Ortiz.

However, regardless of his monumental contributions to Spanish dance – he was the creator of the martinete, a flamenco model reserved till then just for singing; He is the creator of the well-known Sarasate zapateado, he included the studs that he had identified on Broadway into the flamenco shoe to emphasise the heels…—, he ended up mistreated within the closing interval of his life: “He has been a frivolized figure since the seventies due to his sexual ambiguity, his relationships with the Spanish aristocracy and the world’s elites, and he has not gone down in history as the great artist that he was.” This is acknowledged by the professor of social anthropology on the University of Seville, Cristina Cruces, at one level within the movie. “We owe a lot to this dancer, bailaor, choreographer, businessman, artist and creator who raised the level of dance in our country. It was he who gave the impetus for the existence of a National Ballet, who designed unforgettable choreographies still in force for their great quality, and above all, the standard bearer of the recognition of flamenco and Spanish dance internationally,” he provides.

Another cancellation of this distinctive artist who plans for the documentary may have come as a consequence of his label as a Francoist artist, one thing that each one the voices collaborating within the documentary categorically deny. Cruces, in actual fact, provides for instance his tour of the previous Soviet Union, which he carried out in contravention of orders from the Regime, since there have been no diplomatic relations with that nation. “Antonio did basically whatever he wanted all his life,” says the professor.

These have been nonetheless the glory years of an artist born from the streets, of whom a primary recording is preserved on the age of eight by which he seems dancing within the Reales Alcázares of Seville in entrance of King Alfonso This documentary portrays “the man who improved the international face of a country that mostly projected dictatorship,” says its director: he acted in Hollywood movies, had Charles Chaplin, Ava Gardner, Maria Callas and Mijaíl Barýshnikov himself amongst his followers, he promoted and directed the primary National Ballet of Spain. Although they fired him arguing his problematic nature. “When you have been the only artist who has visited the great stages of the world, you have been invited to the Scala in Milan, you have triumphed in Paris and you have had Picasso himself surrender before you, the management of that must be very complicated; especially if you do not have anyone at your side to tell you: come down to earth, you are mortal,” the journalist and veteran dance critic Marta Carrasco displays through the documentary.

Antonio’s life is typical of a fiction, delivery, success, life on the peak and closing decline till present oblivion. “In Spain we have no memory for our great names. We clearly forget those who have built art. And Antonio is a figure to reclaim, a figure that should represent us all.”