Carmen, a Gypsy Geography

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I have been chasing Carmen most of my life or, perhaps, she’s been chasing me. In theaters, archives, tablaos, flamenco studios, and on concert stages, I have searched for her. This book articulates the spiritual, geographic map of that experience and hunt. Writing a book is a labor of love and many people contribute to its final shape. First I must thank my editor, the Editor-in-Chief of Wesleyan University Press, Suzanna Tamminen, for her belief in what she termed a “poetic history” of flamenco and in the idea that the female body—that of the Gypsy dancer—could house history and hold it in the bounds of human form, allowing it to flow forth into present-day consciousness as she moves across the stages of the Islamic Mediterranean world. I would also like to thank the staff of Wesleyan University Press, in particular Leslie Starr, and the University Press of New England, Amanda Dupuis and Rosemary Williams, as well as seminal dance editor/writer Elizabeth Zimmer for her excellent editorial eye. Secondly, I am indebted to my good friend Daniel Potter, literary theorist and information designer, who taught me through generous and painstaking analysis to understand and articulate the theoretical space of the body in historical and literary analysis. Had it not been for these discussions and endless editing, this work would not have come to be. While enrolled in Professor Robert DuPlessis’ History seminar, Women and Social Change, my father gave me several books of female poets from the ancient Middle East, including Lerner’s The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History. Carmen, a Gypsy Geography originated in DuPlessis’ seminar and in the idea that women drive history and contribute to its shape, flow, and historical articulation. I am forever lucky that my mother is Professor Emerita Judith Chazin-Bennahum . In her many published works and our numerous coffee-talks, she communicated to me her commitment to the steps of a dance as constructing a language [xx] Acknowledgments worthy of close study; a vocabulary of movement that drives historical experience. I am also grateful to Professor Lynn Garafola, whose ability to see clearly the shape of history, and dance’s place in it, always seems magical. I feel indebted to Professors Michelle Heffner-Hayes and Sharon Friedler who believed in each escobílla—entrance and exit of Carmen, the ultimate Gypsy flamenco bailaora—and helped it come to be. Their feminist interpretations of dancers’ movements have long inspired me. For new, Africanist perspectives on Flamenco and Gypsy cultural history, I welcome the inspiring new scholarship of Dr. Meira Goldberg and Dr. Katita Milazzo. And thank you to Susan Glazer, Director of the School of Dance at the University of the Arts, who gave me the courage to really teach from my gut. I would also like to thank my friend and colleague, the Editor-in-Chief of Dance Magazine, Wendy Perron, with whom I’ve hung out many a night after the theater discussing the notion of female choreographic embodiment and the global explosion of female dance artists. I am forever grateful to my great friend, choreographic new media artist and composer, Kim Arrow, who has always thrown lightning bolts of creative inspiration my way. I am indebted to the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale de l’Opéra, especially chief music librarian, Romain Feist, and archivist, Valerie Gressel, who over the course of many visits helped me to unearth archives ranging from Bizet’s scores to bullfighting; the staff of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; and the librarians at L’Institut du Monde Arabe. I thank especially curator and matador Patrick Simeon of the Musée des Cultures Taurines in Nîmes for educating me on the subject of the French bullfight. I am also grateful to Tanisha Jones, Director of the Moving Image Archive of the Special Research Collections of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, as well as the head of Photographic Archives, Alice Standin, and the wonderful curators Barbara Cohenstratyner and Jan Schmidt. I would like in addition to express my gratitude to the staff at the Roger-Viollet Archives, who helped me to place photographs in this book, and to Christine Pinault of the Musée Picasso. For her many lessons on the twin subjects of feminist archiving and desert peoples, I thank Roselyne Chenu for the courage with which she lives. I am grateful to Antoine...