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

On the Argentine capital’s premiere stages, Western concert dance forms and pre-Columbian indigenous themes continually crossed during the twentieth century. One day in 2011, I experienced one of these crossings as I sifted through archival materials at the General San Martín Cultural Center in Buenos Aires. Among the center’s audiovisual collection, I encountered a recording of a public television program called Buenos Aires, ciudad secreta (Buenos Aires: Secret City, 1994–2004). In a 1995 episode, the celebrated Argentine choreographer Oscar Araiz is asked to comment on the Argentine and international legacies of Vaslav Nijinsky, the star of the influential Ballets Russes. Araiz’s commentary framed journalist Germinal Nogués’s discussion of the Ballets Russes’s successful 1913 Buenos Aires tour and the ultimately unrealized Caaporá project (1915), an Argentine ballet that was slated for choreography by Nijinsky and based on a legend from the Guaraní indigenous group (Buenos Aires, ciudad secreta). As I considered Araiz’s comments on Nijinsky’s work, I asked myself: Why did the creators of Caaporá call on Nijinsky to choreograph the work? Why invoke a pre-Columbian indigenous legend at the turn of the century, a moment intensely concerned with all things modern? Why feature Araiz in this television episode on Nijinsky, and where did his own works based on pre-Columbian themes and his well-known version of La consagración de la primavera (The Rite of Spring, 1966), the Igor Stravinsky score originally choreographed by Nijinsky, fit into this story?

Taking up these questions, this article argues for the central roles of the unrealized Caaporá and Araiz’s Consagración in the establishment (1915) and reimagination (1966) of concert dance as a site of modernity in Argentina. Both works danced modernity through imagined indigenous bodies and centered two influential figures with privileged relationships to the modern. Rather than offer a comprehensive account of Argentine concert dance works that incorporated mythic pre-Columbian themes, this article demonstrates how Caaporá and Consagración marked critical transitions in the ongoing strategy to fold indigenism into the dancing of modernity. A movement in literature and the visual arts as well as concert dance across the first half of the twentieth century, Latin American [End Page 44] indigenism combined “pre-Columbian imagery and symbols” with the European artistic traditions and trends that cultural elites championed as part of postcolonial nation-building projects (Kirkpatrick 2000, 184).

In Argentina, indigenism developed in the early twentieth century as Argentine artists attempted to cultivate a local national identity while simultaneously articulating the nation as part of Western modernity, defined alternately as a historical period (beginning roughly in the 1500s), a set of aspirations (socio-economic, cultural, etc.), and/or a mode of experience. Marshall Berman famously described modernity as a continual process, a “maelstrom” driven by socioeconomic modernization or “the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a perpetual state of becoming” (1988, 16). In Argentina, cultural modernisms such as indigenism came to constitute the “variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as objects of modernization” (Berman 1988, 16).1

In the course of the twentieth century, modernist ballet and modern dance forms gained traction in Argentina in the context of cultural and economic debates that figured Europe and the United States as models; however, the problem remained of establishing these forms as Argentine. In his recent article “Racialized Dance Modernisms in Lusophone and Spanish-Speaking Latin America,” Jose Reynoso shows how twentieth-century “dance practices that combined ballet and modern dance with indigenous and Africanist expressive cultures participated in constructing hybrid national subjectivities that embodied both ‘culturally marked’ Latin American artistic practices and what is often assumed as ‘unmarked’ whiteness as representative of the ‘universal’” (2015, 392). In Argentina, ballet and modern dance signaled a universalized cultural advancement aligned with whiteness, while indigenous myths staged uniquely Latin American origins that held racial difference at a distance from the modern present. Caaporá and Consagración negotiated the “marked” (pre-Columbian themes) and the “unmarked” (ballet and...

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