Picasso’s dance

he fell in the afternoon at the magnificent Plaza de Francia. Rainy wind, gray, overcast skies threatened the storms of the season in this part of the world. Some people with quick steps referred to the “Anita Villalaz” Theater.” to attend the dance show that the masterful Fernando Hurtado and his group will present as a sign of respect for the “Bailarines en azul de Barcelona” exhibition.

These lithographs are part of the pattern “Picasso. Still a wonder” which is located these days, and until July 29 House of Spain in Panama (Paseo de las Bóvedas/former Casa del Soldado) in the traditional Barrio de San Felipe. These are late works (performed in the 40s), but whose origin is linked to his pink period. The Dancers collection consists of 14 copperplate etchings in an academic style, many of them freehand in one line.

For the presentation, 11 lithographs were distributed in the reception hall and on the stage, where we enthusiastically and joyfully watched a small dance suite, which brought to life the gestures captured in the panels and the artist’s soul, his anxiety and ecstasy, drawing in fast, firm and noble foreshortenings of the dancers’ figures. Figures of great beauty and expressiveness. Thinking about them means listening to the dancers’ conversations and their exercises calisthenics or the relationship before and after the dance. From those cartoons, 3 young dancers followed teacher Hurtado. They are: Alexa Casanova, Abril Reyes and Mariana Vlieg, three talented Graduated from Steps Academy. His expressive gestures, jumps, convulsions; a mixture of passion, surrender and longing, in six episodes illuminated by lights and accompanied by Satie’s music in a simply dreamy, magical staging.

“Blues de Barcelona” jumped in. landscape. they possessed bodies small dance groups. And at the end, when the darkness of the stage turned into complete night, the audience spontaneously stood up to applaud this transmutation and artistic transmigration of souls. We were in Barcelona.

We live in Paris. We woke up in Panama. Travels that give the magic of art and the passion of artists. Mysteries that are realized when great art touches the depths of the heart.

And that’s it Picasso loved dancing. It was not for nothing that his first wife was a dancer, and the atmosphere is Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes would wrap it up more than once (Pulcinella, Hat with three corners, Le train Bleu, Flamenco painting and Mercure). Also, let’s recall, Picasso painted the scenography for several ballets.

Among such, the most famous would be the Parade in the seventh season of the ballet, 1917, within the Dadaist conception, Leonide Massibe’s scenography and clear Cubist aesthetics. In short, pure avant-garde from the 20s of the last century. Well, the libretto comes from no less than the great Jean Cocteau, As written by the Madrid Center for Dance and Art. “As in his other works, in accordance with Cubist principles, he sought to rediscover the deep reality of forms and objects, achieving, in this case, a new way of understanding the scene, with other dimensions, different densities and expensive planes… But this originality is not only limited to the scene, but also takes into account the relationship between the actor or dancer and the scene, designing costumes based on such relationships, creating an avant-garde wardrobe. (See: https://centrodedanzayartedemadrid.com/blog/picasso-y-la-danza/).

They are particularly famous Picasso’s scenography for the “Triangle hat”, of his compatriot Manuel de Falla, a work that premiered in London in July 1919. Also, towards the end of his life, sinking into a certain melancholy, Picasso made 22 prints between 1968 and 1971, that is, two years before his death. .

In the Appendix Picasso loved music And that is: can there be ballet without music? Could be. This is without music to fill and break the air. But not if we are talking about the inner music, time, rhythm and compass inherent in dance. I have already mentioned Eric Satie, the favorite composer of the greats Pablo Ruiz Picasso. Via Picasso, Satie met other Cubists such as Georges Braque with whom he came to design various projects. At that time Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes they were a relative eccentricity, just as the image of the universal Malaga came to be. Both music and painting sought classical purity and the avant-garde. Gnosis introspection, inner journey. Gymnopedia, dance music. Gnossiennes, Music of the Mind (written between 1888 and 1891).

Picasso thinks. Picasso’s dance. And here I allow myself a digression. It has been said that Satie is certainly a forerunner of Debussy and that his reflections on the relationship between music and other arts, especially painting, are profound and undoubtedly influenced that curious mind that Picasso always had. It was a strong musical bond that united Picasso with Don Manuel, and the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, one of the most famous known in Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In addition, expressions of the relationship between plastic art and dance art were in the air in that Paris where many leading innovators and creators from around the world gathered. How to forget, in plastic, that cosmic mural that is “La Danza” (from 1909, now in MOMA, and another from 1910, in Saint Petersburg), by Henri Matisse (another genius who at that time competed with Picasso for leadership and fame in the plastic arts by leading the so-called Fauvism); or previous paintings by Edgar Degás (relevant figures of Impressionism, and caricatures of post-impressionist Toulouse Lautrec (died around 1901) on the subject of dancers, ballet studios and cabarets in fashion like Moulin Rouge. Then Kandinsky, around 1926, he will even go so far as to draw linear strokes, reports of dance movement. Hours and hours of study, so that the colors danced on the helpless white.

Everything was moving, everything was dancing. And equally from the source of literary renewal – where the letters seem to fly – in the experiments of graphic poems, such as the famous calligrams Guillaume Apollinaire, (Songs of peace and war1914-1918 Murdered poet) being this is the poet closest to Picasso’s worldview, without diminishing the friendship that would connect him with the great Paul Éluard. (It is worth remembering that calligraphy would have Arabic origins and expressions in the European Middle Ages, and that modern calligraphy would have such important exponents in Spanish as Gerardo Diego and Guillermo de Torre, in Spain, or José Juan Tablada in Mexicoand Cabrera Infante in Cuba.) Picasso saw. Picasso I felt, I drank from those springs, I would pour them over, as evidenced by the lithographs whose visit I encourage in these lines. Go dance with them!