Dancing beyond the Cactus Curtain

As the dance artists that the Mexican government created through its schools and companies matured, they carried its dances across international borders. The tensions between nationalist esthetics and more formal approaches to creating art were increasingly visible in Mexican painting, yet its fractious dancers proved established a unified front when it came to performing outside of Mexico. The resulting encounters with the official performing arts policies of the Soviet Union and China shifted their perspectives on issues of esthetics and technique. Their government’s concurrent discovery that the folk dances its modern dancers performed overseas provided positive press changed its perspective as well. Amalia Hernández and her independent Ballet Folklórico would garner the direct support of Mexico’s president and her success in providing potent stagings of national identity for audiences inside and outside her homeland marked the moment when Mexico’s dancers became the equals of its celebrated painters.

An Anthropologist Orders a Beer

The extended turmoil associated with the decade-long armed portion of the Mexican Revolution provoked widespread concern about how the country would remake itself once the violence ended. Establishing a national esthetic as a means of unification played a significant role in this discussion, which began before hostilities ended. Some of the early manifestations of what might be regarded as Mexican nationalism arose from an appreciation of the land’s indigenous heritage while it was still under Spanish control. Although the willingness to fully embrace the indigenous components of its culture was largely a twentieth century phenomenon, by the late nineteenth century Mexican intellectuals did understand the nation to be essentially mestizo, or mixed race. It was from these premises that the discussion departed.

Ballets without Ballerinas?

The production of socially conscious dance associated with the Lázaro Cárdenas administration suffered a decline when his successor pointed Mexico in a more conservative direction in terms of economic and cultural policy. Ballet temporarily re-emerged as the favored form. Foreign ballet companies figured prominently in the programming decisions of the government’s Palacio de Bellas Arte and the Ballet Theatre’s production of a Mexican-themed ballet, Léonide Massine’s Don Domingo de Don Blas revived Mexican aspirations for increased international exposure through ballet. On a bet, the government even extended its support to the creation of the Ballet de la Ciudad de Mexico, led by Nellie and Gloria Campobello. While initially well-received, the company soon fell into disfavor; the critics could applaud the scenery, created by the likes of the company’s spokesman José Clemente Orozco, but not the dance for which it had been designed.

A Question of Technique

Mexico’s lack of dance infrastructure was evident to its political leadership. As a new administration shifted the focus of Vasconcelos’ educational program from Mexico’s classical European heritage to that of its working urban and rural peoples, the Secretaría de Educación Pública’s educators sought to employ a still ill-defined Mexican dance as one of its tools to educate the public. Despite a failed first attempt centered on the classical ballet and the financial challenges of the international financial depression, the SEP persisted in its efforts. Abstract painter Carlos Mérida, whose modernism sought to capture the spirit of pre-conquest indigenous art forms, turned the programming of what would become the National School of Dance toward the remnants of “pure” indigenous dance.

Dancing a Sandunga in English

Carlos Chávez was determined to make a name for himself through his dance compositions, trading on the Indian conception of Mexico that permeated potential audiences beyond its borders. He parlayed the international attention his music received into a series of highly influential posts within Mexico’s cultural bureaucracy which gave him, at first, indirect influence and, eventually, full creative control over its state-sponsored theatrical dance. Failing in his efforts to see his ballets produced in his homeland or by the Ballets Russes, he traveled to the U.S., where he finally saw his third ballet, H.P., staged with designs by Diego Rivera. One Mexican critic who had traveled to the U.S for the ballet’s only performance complained about the anglicization of the work’s Mexican dance sources. Nonetheless, it demonstrated that the idea of a Mexican ballet was a viable one.

The Precursors of Mexicanism

Charlot and Siqueiros’s condemnation of the effects of Anna Pavlova and Tórtola Valencia on Mexico’s nascent image of itself provided a strong statement on the power these painters ascribed to theatrical dance in the early twentieth century. It also emphasized the role that foreign dancers played from the very beginning in shaping that image and the ongoing tensions over who decided what was “authentically” Mexican. While in Mexico both women took regional folk dances into their repertoires—Pavlova the jarabe tapatío from Jalisco and Valencia the sandunga from Oaxaca—and nurtured the widespread desire to see Mexican dances performed beyond the nation’s borders. The Secretaría de Educación Pública ensured that Mexicans themselves would see these regional dances as representative of the nation as a whole by incorporating them into its school curriculum, teaching generations of Mexicans to perform them as an expression of shared nationality.

Mexicanism Russian Style

The influence of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes saturated the artistic environment inhabited by Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro in Paris before World War I. In predecessors to the debates surrounding nationalism in Mexico, Diaghilev explored its intersections with folk art in the pages of his magazine Mir iskusstva. Montenegro studied with Diaghilev ally Hermen Anglada who urged his disciples to use elements from their nation’s folklore to escape the hegemony of Parisian modernism. Although Rivera disparaged the Ballet Russes’s influence on Mexican art, he painted his “Mexican trophy,” a cubist Zapatista landscape with a prominent serape, in response to an exhibit of Russian folk art that had been inspired by the success of Diaghilev’s dance company. Montenegro also cited this exhibition as one of the major influences in his decision to pursue Mexican folk art as a source of inspiration.

The Golden Age of Mexican Modern Dance

To help him shape the dance component of the new Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), Carlos Chávez invited the leading exponents of Mexico’s opposing camps of modern dancers to assist him, along with an array of painters, composers, and writers. As part of INBA’s charge to create a universal culture attractive to international audiences, and at a time the U.S. was promoting modern dance as part of its WWII propaganda efforts in the Americas, Chávez’s team created a modern-dance focused Academy of Mexican Dance. Chávez would soon appoint polymath artist Miguel Covarrubias to lead INBA’s dance department, ushering in a “golden age” for Mexican modern dance. INBA underwrote lavish productions by internationally recognized choreographer José Limón, it also extended similar support to its novice choreographers who mounted productions with scores by its leading composers and scenic designs by its most famous artists.

Competing Modernisms

Through Carlos Mérida’s advocacy of the Graham technique, the Secretaría de Educación Pública invited U.S. choreographer Anna Sokolow to perform and teach in Mexico City. The SEP also invited Waldeen Falkenstein to perform, setting up a competition between their opposing styles of socially engaged choreography. Sokolow’s approach was closely aligned to Graham’s ideas; Waldeen claimed to have found her inspiration in specifically Mexican ways of moving. Their antagonistic approach mirrored ongoing divisions in the visual arts community over local inspiration versus an international orientation, though the disciples of both dancers vehemently rejected suggestions of any foreign elements in their work. Sokolow would come to be known as the originator of modern dance in Mexico, but it was Waldeen who created its watershed work, La Coronela (The Woman Coronel), with a distinctly female-centric evocation of Mexico’s revolution.

The Philosopher as an Artist Writ Large

Mexican muralism began as a manifestation of José Vasconcelos’ belief that beautiful environments produced more effective learning. He thought of muralism as decoration and hired his artists for that purpose. That what they created was to be Mexican was a given, but how it was to be Mexican went unspecified. The stained-glass window he commissioned from Roberto Montenegro, unveiled at the outset of the nation’s centennial celebration in 1921, took the jarabe tapatío (Mexican hat dance) as its theme. The commemorative events which followed the window’s unveiling underlined the post-revolutionary government’s intent to separate itself from the French taste associated with the dictatorship it had overthrown. Although the nation’s new leaders may not have had the means to impose a national aesthetic at the time, through its centennial celebration it pronounced itself firmly in favor of folk art as a sign of the national.