Choreographing Modern Mexico: Anna

Pavlova in Mexico City (1919)

1

Jose L. Reynoso

Abstract:
In this article, I examine the role that Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova
played in Mexicos attempts to produce an embodied mestizo modernity that
resonated with efforts to construct a post-revolutionary modern nation. After
the revolution of 1910, cultural modernization consisted in the integration of
Mexicos histories of indigenous civilizations and European influences in the
production of expressive cultures intended to be local in character but universal
in their appeal. I argue that Pavlovas performances from her Europeanized
ballet repertoire as well as her balleticized rendition of Mexican folk dances
helped to create a social space in which Mexican elites could reaffirm their
affinity with international cosmopolitan classes while also attempting to retain
a sense of Mexican distinctiveness. I contextualize my analysis by attending to
racial and class formations implicated in the production of Mexico as a modern
nation within the context of colonialist legacies informing notions of Western
cultural modernity.
Keywords: modernity; dance; nationalism; colonialism; whiteness; Anna
Pavlova; Mexico; mestizo.

The modern and traditional, civilized and savage, universal and

local danced together, in the same body, when the famous Russian
ballerina, Anna Pavlova, danced on the Mexican concert stage in 1919,
only nine years after the onset of the Mexican Revolution.2 In this
paper, I will examine the role Pavlovas visit played in the paradoxical
process through which third world countries such as Mexico engage
in an endless quest to catch up with modernity. These countries
Modernist Cultures 9.1 (2014): 8098
DOI: 10.3366/mod.2014.0075
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/mod

Choreographing Modern Mexico

endeavor to construct a local identity while at the same time they
develop artistic practices with universal reach in order to appeal to
the civilized first world. Post-revolutionary, nationalist projects of
cultural modernization in Mexico included the countrys indigenous
and European backgrounds in efforts to construct a distinctive mestizo
modernity that was Mexican in character but also more universally
appealing.3
Pavlova not only performed in Mexico the Europeanized ballet
repertoire that had consolidated her as a universalized referent of
Western high culture, but she also re-choreographed a series of
Mexican folk dances for which El Jarabe Tapato figured as center
piece.4 I argue that Pavlovas performances from her Europeanized
repertoire as well as her balleticized rendition of Mexican folk
dances helped create in Mexico City a social space in which Mexican
elites could reaffirm their shared affinity with their cosmopolitan
counterparts in the first world while also attempting to retain
their Mexican distinctiveness. By combining ballet and Mexican folk
traditions, Pavlovas refined El Jarabe Tapato embodied complex
tensions and negotiations between the governments revolutionary
populist efforts as well as the national and international capitalist
bourgeoisies aesthetic tastes and material interests. Furthermore,
Pavlova not only relied on her cosmopolitan Mexican collaborators in
re-choreographing El Jarabe Tapato but also learned from those who
enjoyed the original popular dance.
Pavlova debuted at the prestigious Teatro Arbeu on January, 25,
1919, and, as her season unfolded, Mexican critics and audiences
raved about Pavlovas modern ballets such as The Dying Swan. This
piece embodied with profound emotive force the modernist impulse
being produced in dance at the turn of the twentieth century by dance
artists like the Ballet Russes and Isadora Duncan in Europe and the
USA. As I examine the construction of Pavlova as an artistic genius
by international elites and critics, I contextualize The Dying Swan as an
embodied signifier of the modern, civilized and universal tropes that
have been typically associated with Western cultural modernity. These
characteristics resonated with Mexicos own pursuits for a synthesis of
Western modernity and a refined version of the traditional, a project
to which Pavlova contributed.
Before Pavlova re-choreographed El Jarabe Tapato and danced
it on pointe, the countrys elites generally regarded traditional folk
dance, popular among the masses, as unrefined if not savage. By
corporeally inflecting folk dance with her balletic aesthetics of the
universal and civilized modern, Pavlova prompted Mexican cultural

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architects to realize the potential for refining Mexican popular dances
as integral to Mexicos modernized mestizo cultural production. These
efforts were not distinct from neocolonial practices that located power,
prestige, and cultural superiority in the modern, civilized, and
universal as opposed to the racialized traditional, savage, and
local. But the resulting mestizo dance practices combining ballet,
and then modern dance, with Mexican folk expressive cultures
represented a challenge to notions of Western modernity that assumed
an exclusive link between whiteness and universality.

De/Constructing the Genius: Dis/Embodying

the Universal
This performative description of The Dying Swan intends to reflect
how its choreography embodied tropes that international critics and
audiences embraced in appreciating and consuming dance-as-art at
the turn of the twentieth century. I will suggest that as a resilient
dying swan, Pavlova served as a metonym for the modernized resilient
Mexico that critics, audiences, and government officials aspired to
construct as the armed phase of the revolution waned.5
Lights up:
Her firm, straight legs on pointe support her body as her white tutu
reflects tiny percussive motions produced by quick, petite steps that
provide physical equilibrium, and metaphorically, a hold over her
life. Like a winged creature, her arms waver incessantly in undulating
motions to her sides before reaching up as if begging for the strength
to endure her inner ordeal. But her body gives up and collapses to
the floor. Her relaxing shoulders, her arms lifelessly hinging at the
shoulder joint, her softly bent wrists, elbows, and neck physicalize a
momentary emptying of the vital energy that keeps her alive.
As she recovers her standing position, her bird-like arms waver
again while looking upwards as if clamoring to maintain her body held
at the tip of her pointe shoes. She falls down once more, she attempts
to stand back up but her body trembles hesitantly. A sudden burst of
energy enables her to lift up her frail body as she keeps on defying the
forces that try her physical strength, through her inner determination,
her will power to live.
Her head tilts gazing downwards as if acknowledging the ground
whose gravitational pull has already claimed her body twice. Her quick,
petite steps take her through space seemingly with no defined spatial
orientation, while her wing-like arms spasmodically burst up, down, to

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the sides. She falls to the ground, her body crumbling. Her arms now
bend sharply to then release their muscle tension as if life-sustaining
energy escapes her body. Seemingly depleted of any physical strength,
the weight of her arms, torso, and head entirely surrender into the
embrace of gravitys pull. Her upper body bends over her extended
leg resting on the ground. In a few dramatically short seconds, her
body succumbs to its seemingly inevitable end death itself.
Lights stand by to slowly fade out . . . . .Go!
The Dying Swan became one of Pavlovas signature pieces and
prompted international audiences and critics to mythologize
her as an anthropomorphic swan. Her extraordinarily cultivated
physicality quickness, lightness, and suppleness seem to have
combined with the lore of the dancing swan to constitute what her
admirers called her genius. For these physical and discursive qualities,
audiences and critics in Mexico embraced Pavlova fervently.
Among Mexican critics who enthusiastically wrote in response
to The Dying Swan, Luis A. Rodriguez (1919) exalted Pavlova as the
divine genius of the dance, the one who with roses and myrtles
has crowned Terpsichore, the smiling Greek goddess, the one and
only dancer capable of aestheticizing pain and death in such a way
that the critic effusively exclaimed after witnessing the piece: How
beautifully do swans die!6 Albeit uncritically, Rodriguez captured the
discursive forces that Pavlova embodied as she bourred on the tip of
her pointe shoes across international concert stages and social spaces.
He wrote, your cosmopolitan soul has the exquisite Greek purity, the
voluptuousness of the Orient, the French gallantry from the times of
the Louises [. . . ], the extravagance and craziness of modernity, the
subtlety of spiritualism and the intrinsic majesty of the classical.7 For
Rodriguez the soul that animated Pavlovas body was a cosmopolitan
one for it embodied discourses that sustained the pillars of Western
culture and its colonizing enterprises: Orientalism; ancient Greek
culture as the legitimizing, highest standard for human civilization;
an aesthetically induced spirituality; and Western modernity. Thus
Pavlovas cosmopolitan soul materialized in some of her dances
an Oriental mystique appropriating and representing the Orient
as a source of originality, redemptive spirituality, sanitized erotic
engagement, and paradoxically, as an identity against which the
West defined itself within the context of colonialism. Critics like
Rodriquez might have perceived this Orientalism as intrinsic to
Pavlovas Russian easternness. They also seem to have valued a
cosmopolitanism infused with an Oriental mystique as a prevalent

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convention characteristic of some dances performed by Pavlova and
others like the Ballet Russes in Europe and Ruth St. Denis in the USA
during the 1910s and 1920s.8
Yet Pavlovas constructed identity as an artistic genius rested
not solely on her ability to produce an oriental aura within which
white Western audiences could consume exotic cultural Others. For
Rodriguez, she also possessed both a majestic classicism substantiated
by her exquisite Greek purity as well as the royal gallantry of French
culture. Embracing a universalist discourse, Walford Hyden (1931),
Pavlovas musical director and biographer, echoed Rodriguezs words
by writing that Pavlova
brought a vision of loveliness that will remain when the pranks of
distorted acrobats and poseurs have been forgotten. Classical grace and
charm can never become dmod. She represented in her person the
climax of an aristocratic restraint and delicacy in art with centuries
of tradition behind it, coming unbroken from the court of Louis XIV
through the rare culture of Old Russia.9

While dismissing low-brow cultural practices as ephemeral fads rooted

in mundane banalities and thus doomed to oblivion, Hyden exalts
Pavlovas grace, charm, and delicacy as embodied signifiers of
the classical and aristocratic. He anchors these socially constructed
qualities to a tradition traceable to the court of Louis XIV. Although
filtered through her aged Russian culture, Hyden conceptualizes
Pavlovas choreographic enactments of the classical and aristocratic
as transcending time and space and thereby suggesting that they
could never be dmod. For Pavlovas enthusiastic apologists in Mexico
and abroad, her aristocratically transcendental dancing attested the
purportedly inherent universal nature of high art as the means of
production and communication of a culturally superior spirituality.
Finally, as Rodriguez (1919) noted, Pavlovas cosmopolitan
soul embodied as she danced the extravagance and craziness of
modernity. While The Dying Swan retained aesthetic values of classical
ballet, it also choreographed a modernist impulse being produced at
the turn of the twentieth century. Pavlova, Fokine, and others had
been enchanted by how Isadora Duncans modernist expressivity of
the human spirit challenged physical and ideological constraints that
informed notions of the body and dance production in the nineteenth
century. As Pavlova summarized it: we added to our ancient technique
[ballet] the abandon and classic beauty of Isadora Duncans sublime
art, augmenting the power and sensitiveness of our instrument [the
body].10

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In the context of this new modernist expressivity, Pavlovas The
Dying Swan embodied a discursively transcendental human spirit,
especially its expressive resilience and pursuit of freedom. This
choreographed embodiment of resilience signified for her audiences
an inner force: the will power to live, to be free, to transcend. These
spiritualized modernist aesthetics embodied a universal spiritual
quest that resonated with Mexicos struggles and aspirations during
and after the last years of the armed phase of the revolution.
In efforts to institutionalize revolutionary mandates, the Mexican
Institutional Congress approved Mexicos new constitution in 1917
under president Venustiano Carranza. Among its aims, the document
set the bases for agrarian reform, benefits for the labor sector, and
a lay, free education for all Mexicans. However, economic and social
reforms encountered systematic resistance by powerful land owners
and other capitalists while armed groups aligned with and from the
popular sectors continued fighting for the implementation of what the
new constitution promised them. In 1919 when armed revolutionary
factions were still active in the country, Carranza sent troops to guard
the train in which Pavlova and her company traveled from the port
of Veracruz to Mexico City upon her arrival in the country. As an
embodiment of modern spiritual resilience, Pavlova enacted the hopes
many Mexicans had in the ability of their countrys national spirit to
thrive, to forge ahead as they negotiated their internal conflicts and as
they strived to join the modern world.

Choreographing Homotopia: The Power of the Dancing

Anthropomorphic Swan
Upon her arrival in Mexico City, the Mexican critics and the
bourgeoisie, whose values the former reflected, regarded Pavlova as a
universalized referent of high culture, artistic genius, and stardom.
As an abundance of critical reviews demonstrate, she was already
mythologized as a weightless, gravity-defying anthropomorphic swan
capable of producing an aesthetically induced spiritual link to her
audiences. The classical, aristocratic knowledge enacted by Pavlovas
ballets reflected a particular world order conceived, disseminated, and
consumed by international privileged elites. As a means of knowledge
production, Pavlovas ballet practices reified rather than challenged
codes and conventions representative of the class that had helped
construct, and that benefited from, her genius status. As Pavlovas
dancing beckoned to Mexican elites through its aesthetics of the

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universal, her concerts in Mexico City constructed a quasi-sacred social
space a homotopic space. In this social space, members of a class of
culturally diverse people, who were nevertheless similarly privileged,
engaged in an exchange of embodied, visual, audible, and intertextual
referents that reinforced identifications with values, interests, and
desires of their social class own creation.
Michel Foucault (1986) has postulated that heterotopias are
something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia
in which . . . all the other real sites that can be found within the
culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.11
Not without tensions, the utopic impulse in a heterotopia might be
conducive to sociopolitical and cultural exchanges among a diversity
of participant factions coexisting in a given social space. Reversing
Foucaults heterotopia, I propose the concept of homotopia as a site in
which the utopic impulse would not be for diversity but for sameness,
a social space where the preservation of the status quo through
reproducing sociopolitical, economic, and cultural values among
similars would constitute the ideal world. Formulated discursively and
choreographed physically through quotidian comportment as well as
dances on the concert stage, this homotopic space is effectively enacted
in the here and now rather than being an ever-longed-for imaginary
possibility. In this vein, by dancing the embodied values and interests
of international, Europeanized classes, Pavlova created the social space
where individual and collective identities could be reaffirmed at the
moment of consuming dance on the Mexican concert stage.
The armed insurrection led many capital owners, artists, and
intellectuals throughout Mexico to move periodically or permanently
to the relative safety offered by Mexico City as the countrys economic
and cultural center. The citys modern development was being shaped
not only by these migrating and local Mexicans but also by powerful
businessmen and bankers from France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Britain,
and the USA who had established themselves in Mexico.12 Delia
Salazar Anaya (2009) asserts that this migrant minority and their
business partners or national competitors [. . . ] exemplified the societal
model that the porfirista elite had delineated: a set of public policies
inspired by French and British positivism and aiming at turning
Mexico into a prosperous and modern, as well as a whiter, country.13
Despite their distinctive stakes in Mexicos modernizing efforts,
Mexican and foreign capitalists living in the country as well as artists
and intellectuals who stayed during the revolution, and those returning
from exile, constituted the elites to which Pavlovas work initially
appealed. By aligning themselves with Pavlovas cosmopolitan soul,

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Mexican elites reaffirmed themselves not only as civilized modern
Mexicans but also as members of an internationalized, cosmopolitan
class, the ones who enabled the genius of the ballet to articulate an
embodied representation of what modern Mexico could be.

Re/Constructing the Nation: Towards Choreographing

Mestizo Embodied Modernity
Government efforts to enact land, labor, and educational reforms
were accompanied by the institutionalization of the means of cultural
production the formation of artists and the provision of funding and
spaces for showcasing their art as a major force in the countrys
modernizing, nationalist project. This fervent cultural nationalism
fueled a renewed interest in mestizaje as the defining racial make up
and cultural identity of the nascent modern Mexico. Tace Hedrick
(2003) suggests that influential people such as anthropologist Manuel
Gamio and first minister of education Jos Vasconcelos (19201926)
helped establish the primacy of a mestizo state that shaped the
Mexican governments educational programs and cultural production
for the masses.14 It was Vasconcelos who commissioned Diego Rivera,
Jos Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, among others, to
paint in public buildings monumental murals reflective of Mexicos
indigenous and mestizo history within the context of the countrys
nationalist revolutionary project.
In his essay on ways of exalting indianness in Mexico during
1921, Rick A. Lpez (2006) includes in this class of cosmopolitan
nationalists inside and outside the government artists and intellectuals
who retuned from exile in Europe and joined efforts towards rebuilding the nation based on its indigenous cultures.15 This modernized
mestizo nationalism responded to the conundrum that elites in third
world countries like Mexico face as they seek to join global modernity.
Such an enterprise consists not only in gaining technological and
scientific advancement as well as establishing democratically and
economically based governing institutions but also constructing a
sophisticated, yet paradoxical, local identity national in character
and universal in appeal. In their indigenized modernizing attempts,
post-revolutionary leaders strove to appropriate Mexicos indigenous
culture by eliticizing it through processes of cultural refining, sanitizing, and whitening. An unbending cultural elitism characterized
these efforts as cultural authorities and experts implicitly shared the
idea that popular arts had [no . . . ] direct value except as raw material
for elite artists [my emphasis].16

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Modernist Cultures
Among this group of Mexican cultural architects, Adolfo Best
Maugard played a significant role in producing Pavlovas Fantasia
Mexicana, a short series of Mexican folk dances in which El Jarabe
Tapato figured as centerpiece. Through his own aesthetic language and
theory of Mexican art, Best Maugard attempted to demonstrate that
the modern, cosmopolitan artist could reconfigure popular arts in ways
expressive of the nascent modern nation.17 This artistic epistemology
assumed that only the internationalized-cosmopolitan artist could
transform into art of profound beauty the raw primitive purity
hidden in the countrys inextinguishable and unexplored mundane
ordinariness of the popular, the folk, and the vernacular.18
These racialized inter-cultural and inter-class processes of
constructing elite culture within the colonialist contexts have framed
nation formation in third world countries like Mexico as they
negotiate efforts towards self-definition, self-determination, and
modernization in relation to the first world. Colonial efforts to
civilize have been invariably tied to international relations mediated
by military interventions, the creation of economic dependencies,
and scientific discourses. However, I intend here to highlight how
through cultural production sets of values that sustain the interests
of ruling classes in the first world are adapted by third world elites
in their respective locales as a self-affirmation of belongingness to a
shared cosmopolitan and modern yet colonized, subordinate reality.
I will suggest that this complicity among cosmopolitans constituted
the Mexican bourgeois and revolutionary elites as an inter-class
colonizing force. They naturalized class divisions through the selective
inclusion and exclusion of cultural production that served to legitimize
the revolutionary state while attempting to modernize the country, a
process in which Pavlova participated during her visit to Mexico.
As Marta Savigliano (1995) has noted, class is also a key element
in exoticism when the social practices of the poor [. . . ] food, fashion,
music, and dance [are] borrowed and refined for the pleasure of
those who could afford them.19 Additionally, as part of an implicit
civilizing mission, exoticism has been key in the re-production of
colonization in which the imperial desire for exotic others leads
colonized subordinates to engage in the formation of autoexoticized
identities. Savigliano writes:
The imperial powers, a step above the colonized nations in the
hierarchies of morality, civilization, and wealth, could choose to represent
the colonial nations through whichever sector they wished [. . . ] The
only accuracy that counts for the colonizer is the one that is faithful

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to the colonizers own stereotyping of what colonies are like. It is for
this very reason that the representative of the colony should be the most
uncivilized, the most primitive, the most distinguishable/different from
the colonizer . . . 20

At the turn of the twentieth century, Mexican elites materialist

modernization was sustained by a discursive cultural ideology of
whitened refinement as modeled by colonialist cultural expansionism
that relied on exotic others as source of raw cultural material.
In the case of Pavlovas El Jarabe Tapato, class, imbricated with
race and ethnicity, became an additional auto/exoticizing element in
fulfilling the imperial desire for racial, ethnic, and/or class-based exotic
others a desire embodied by foreign as well as native colonizing
agents.
A cadre of legitimized authorities and experts in Mexican history
and post-revolutionary emerging mestizo cultural production enabled
Pavlovas engagement with modernizing processes of selective rechoreographing through which low brow cultural practices were
elevated to the realm of high art. Pavlovas balletic aesthetics thus
elevated El Jarabe Tapato to a refined choreography of mestizo
modernity that reconfigured Mexican popular culture by employing
an elite discourse of refined taste associated with European Western
cultural modernity. However, as part of these eliticizing processes,
Pavlova transgressed the sacrosanct social and artistic interactions of
the homotopia she had established with her more conservative elite
audiences. She not only performed for the popular masses in places
considered by Mexican socialites as of ill repute, but she also engaged
corporeally with people who performed there by learning their dances.

Eliticizing the Popular and the Folk: A Dance Between

the Universal and the Local
Dances such as El Jarabe Tapato and the performance genre in which it
was typically included, tandas, were associated with rural, uneducated,
and unrefined performers and audiences. For the refined taste of
architects and gatekeepers of Mexican high culture, such performers
and audiences represented the very embodiment of anti-Culture and
anti-modernity, the bodies that lagged behind in the history of Western
civilization in its linear race towards progress. After dancing for a few
weeks at the prestigious Teatro Arbeu, Pavlova opened a season at the
Teatro Principal, a venue considered by some as of ill repute and which

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Carlos Gonzalez Pea (1919) characterized as the mud hut of tandas.
He rationalized such a seeming paradox with the following words:
In Mexicos theater life we are witnessing a surprising phenomenon: Art
has transferred from the Arbeu to El Principal [. . . ] The Arbeu, ennobled
by a long tradition of culture, dignified [by a series of international
figures]. And on the contrary, the Principal that theater stuck for twentyfive years in a culturally minor genre infamous by the stunts of two
generations of hetairists, and by the coarseness of thousands of pseudo
plays characterized by vulgarity and lack of common sense will be
purified by opening its doors to that wonder of winged grace, of light,
of diverse genius that is Anna Pavlowas Art [. . . which] will convert into
subtle perfumes at least for two weeks the stinky miasmas of that old
sewer.21

Despite harsh disregard for venues such as El Principal, Pavlovas

high art dancing in those places spoke powerfully, albeit distinctively,
to various people about a new sense of Mexicanness, one that
was populist yet reflective of elitist aesthetic values. This synthesis
embodied the governments inclusive efforts and the elites aesthetic
taste and material interests.
In the midst of enmeshing interests, the purifying gift of
Pavlovas art to which Gonzalez Pea referred was being channeled
through marketing strategies, government-sanctioned tax breaks, and
reduced prices in order to popularize her art. She was thus able to
summon 16,000 people at the Circo de la Condesa. Two weeks prior
to her debut in this outdoors bullfight ring, also known as La Plaza
de Toros El Toreo, a wild lioness fought a bull as part of a program
offered by the Grand Rivero Circus, and a group of comedians from
Spain presented a buffo-bullfighting-burlesque show including an act
in which the comedian Charlot imitated the brilliant Anna Pavlowa.22
Despite the coarse and vulgar nature of shows usually presented
at these venues, efforts to popularize Pavlovas high art effectively
generated the massive popular patronage that sustained Pavlovas
shows.
Discursive practices associated with efforts to popularize high art
and/or to eliticize the folk and the popular were deeply entrenched
with one another. They operated simultaneously on ideological
and concrete fields of experience motivated by a civilizing impulse
in Mexico during 1919. Unlike Pavlovas Europeanized high art
dances, which remained intact when made accessible to the popular
masses, eliticizing a folk or popular dance, such as El Jarabe
Tapato, implied an inevitable alteration. Processes of eliticization

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selectively reconfigure the dancing body the individual or collective
movements of body parts at one given moment, the amount of
effort exerted in the ways the body moves in space, and the
ways the body should interact with others. Most importantly, the
combination of these selective choreographic reconfigurations must
cultivate a body that appropriately portrays the identity of a refined,
civilized modern subject. A successful eliticization of a folk or
popular dance, then, creates, while it naturalizes, the widest possible
ideological and physical distance between the modernizing creators
who consequently own and commodify the eliticized dance and the
culturally unsophisticated bodies that originally produced it in its
raw form.
Reconstructing Pavlovas corporeal eliticization of El Jarabe Tapato
would not be less difficult than reconstructing any form of Western
theater dance or reconstructing the staging of ancient Greek tragedy
or Shakespearean drama.23 In attempting to reconstruct dances
such as Pavlovas El Jarabe Tapato, the dances material illusiveness,
the archival materials available to historicize it, and the writers
labor that inevitably re-choreographs it function intertextually in the
reconstructive process. In line with this approach within critical dance
studies, I rely on bits of archival information, photographs of Pavlova,
current choreographies of El Jarabe Tapato, and my experience as a
dancer-choreographer in order to reconstruct a textual snap-shot of
what could have been the corporeal encounter between Pavlova and
Eva Prez Caro. According to Josefina Lavalle (2002), it was Prez
Caro, a performer forging a career dancing the Mexican genre in
places considered low class, who taught Pavlova El Jarabe Tapatos
steps.24 I will use the figure of Pavlovas interpreter, assuming she had
one, as one who witnessed the transformation of the folk dances raw
primitive moves into eliticized steps that were eventually performed
on the tip of Pavlovas pointe ballet shoes.
While Madam Pavlowa learned El Jarabe Tapato, Eva suggested to her
to dance the steps on pointe. [Madam] Pavlowa tried it and found it easier,
while at the same time thought that dancing the steps on pointe would prevent
her from getting injured as she tried to learn these steps that were so foreign
to her.25 While Madam Pavlova was on pointe, Eva directed with her right
hand Madam Pavlowas left leg back and forth in a swinging motion for four
counts before ending by emphasizing a stomping of the foot. El Jarabe Tapato
has many steps that emphasize stomping the floor either with the heel or the
whole sole of the feet. But Mr. Pianowski, Madam Pavlowas assistant ballet
master, protested that it was not necessary to stomp that strongly for the mere
touching of the floor with the tip of the pointe ballet shoe conveyed the intention

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of stomping while looking less aggressive. Madam Pavlowa agreed that a lighter
dancing body and softer stomping communicated the delicacy and gracefulness
that characterized an elegant dance. Indeed Madam Pavlowa looked more at
ease while appearing to be suspended in the air, as if she was floating, only held
by the tip of her pointe shoes.
During lessons, Madam Pavlowa was already dressed in a china poblana
skirt and Eva wanted her to master the figure-eight swinging motions of the
skirt that happen recurrently in the dance. Madam Pavlowa was having fun
trying it but at some point she stopped and fixed each arm forming a bow shape
from shoulder to hand while keeping the skirt extended to both sides of her body.
She stretched her left leg forward and rested her pointed foot on the floor. Her
torso was a little twisted to her right while her neck seemed to be elongated as if
reaching towards the sky. As she held this pose, her wrists slightly hinged back
and forth as she delicately and subtly moved the part of the skirt held by her
hands. She asked, How does this look? Beautiful!, Mr. Pianowski rushed to
respond. She told me to ask Eva if she thought that the more delicate and subtle
movements of the skirt still evoked the original dance. Evas face was beaming,
and she said that Madam Pavlowa looked hermosa (beautiful). After several
days, our El Jarabe Tapato had been gracefully refined and made more elegant
at the tip of the ballet pointe shoes of the most famous ballerina in the world,
Madam Pavlowa.
Lights stand by to slowly fade in . . . . . Go!
Madam Pavlowa looked beautiful as a china poblana and Mr. Pianowski stood
well as a gallant charro.26 As the musical rhythm changed, they playfully
interchanged spaces creating a sense of romantic flirting with one another
throughout the dance. Their soft and gliding motions made them look as if
their bodies were floating. But it was Madam Pavlowas dancing on pointe our
El Jarabe Tapato that made us all in the audience realize how beautiful and
elegant our popular dances could be.
Towards the end of the dance, Mr. Pianowski chased Madam Pavlowa in
circles around the brim of his sombrero (hat) already lying on the floor. With
tantalizing coquetry, Madam Pavlova held up her skirt right below her knees
as her china poblana braids swayed from side to side of her head and shoulders
while her refined arching feet sped up on pointe as she performed intricate
footwork to the music. At the grand finale, Madam Pavlowa finally succumbed
to the romantic advances of her charro and they both hid their faces behind
the sombrero suggesting their relationship was consummated with a kiss. People
erupted in euphoric approval as sombreros flew up and down and many men
hurled their own hats onto the stage, hoping that [Madam Pavlowa] would
dance on them.27 It was very emotional to see Madam Pavlowa dancing our El
Jarabe Tapato on her Russian and celestial pointe ballet shoes. Her dancing

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was making the heart of our race palpitate forcibly and our blood precipitate
in a wild uncontrollable torrent as we all joined in yelling out collectively
bravos, hurrahs and increasingly louder Viva Mexico! Viva Mexico! Viva
Mexico!28
Lights stand by to slowly fade out . . . . .Go!

Dancing on Geopolitical Terrains: Choreographing

National and International Politics
Pavlovas El Jarabe Tapato represented the climactic moment in the
series of Mexican traditional dances composing Fantasia Mexicana
performed after her traditional Europeanized repertoire. As Jimnez
Rueda (1919) described it, Pavlovas refined El Jarabe Tapato was
a powerful eye opener. He admitted, with our eyes placed on
the exterior world, we had not realized the aesthetic import of
el jarabe [tapato]. It is a drama that realizes in its apparent
simplicity a mischievous and passionate pursuit reflective of the soul
of our country.29 As Pavlova refocused the eyes of the Mexican
bourgeois and institutionalized revolutionary elites inwards, towards
their own world and soul, her El Jarabe Tapato led them towards
an elevated embodied experience of the nations popular and
vernacular cultures. In its raw and its eliticized form, the folk dance
was a heterosexual courtship piece in which a playful process of
coquetry and seduction found its consummation as the dancing couple
prudishly hid their faces behind the mans sombrero for the audience
to imagine the couples lips locking in an ardent kiss. However,
framed by neocolonialist practices that rely on auto/exoticized others
as part of national identity formation in third world countries,
Pavlovas eliticized El Jarabe Tapato probed beyond the apparent
simplicity of dancing a mere mischievous and passionate pursuit.
Her balleticized folk dance tacitly choreographed the racialized
inter-cultural and inter-class coquetry and courtship, the resistance,
momentary rejections and adulations, the negotiations of historical
time and space, the intimately passionate and timidly prudent
colonialist encounters between the civilizing dancing bodies that
exoticize and the collaborating bodies that auto-exoticize themselves
as a maneuver towards progress and modernity.
Mexican elites continued making efforts to resemble civilized
colonizers whose power was diffused among powerful nations of the
first world reshaping the globe geographically and relationally after
the First World War in 1918. This new world order was formulated in
the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the war and in the creation of

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the League of Nations, an international institution to which Mexico
was not initially invited to join. In this context, artists like Pavlova
circulated around the world as willing and/or unwilling floating
agents of change, as cultural emissaries with an explicit and/or implicit
civilizing mission.
As an influential cultural catalyst in Mexico, Pavlovas refined
El Jarabe Tapato, elevated the popular folk dance to the rank of an
embodied national symbol. Lavalle (2002) noted the seeming irony:
the version of el jarbe [tapato] that had been despised while danced by
Mexican tiples as part of tandas in theaters [considered of ill repute]
became via Anna Pavlova the official jarabe, danced by the nations
children as a national emblem, as the mexican national dance par
excellence [and] accepted by the countrys educational authorities as
didactic material in schools. The Jarabe tapato [. . . .] should have been
named instead [, as some suggested,] the official jarabe [. . . .] as we found
it established and respectable, mingling at festivities with the best of
society.30

As an emblematic part of Mexicos national identity formation, El

Jarabe Tapato required stages broader than classrooms where children
from the popular masses were instructed or dancing floors provided
in festivities for the best of society. The newly invigorated El Jarabe
Tapato also needed a stage on which the imperial desire for an always
subordinate exotic Other and the desire of the colonized to emulate its
defining other as civilized and modern, while remaining distinctively
indigenized, could constantly flirt with and seduce one another, to the
point of fusing in an ardent collaborative kiss.

Concluding Steps
Pavlovas El Jarabe Tapato prompted a search for a modernized
Mexican dance form that could participate in ongoing efforts
to construct post-revolutionary modern Mexico. Tensions between
nationalist and universalist cosmopolitan ideologies among political,
economic, and cultural elites continued during the 1920s. During
the 1930s, government officials as well as national and international
dance artists made efforts to institutionalize the professionalization of
dancers by fully adopting ballet technique for dance training as they
continued searching for a modernized Mexican dance form. The focus
shifted in 1940 when two choreographers from the USA, Anna Sokolow
and Waldeen Falkeinstein, led the first two modern dance companies

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in the country. Their distinctive work addressed questions that echoed
those raised by Pavlovas eliticized El Jarabe Tapato. Artists, critics,
and government officials continued debating how folkloric, or not,
Mexican dance should be as they sought a legitimate modern art
with universal appeal that was also worthy of representing the nation.
From 1919 to 1940, some embraced the notion that cultural specificity
compromised the universal potential of any legitimate modern art,
whether ballet or modern dance. Others challenged the assumption
that ballet and modern dance from Europe and the USA could
stand as the sole representatives of the human experience. Debates
engendered first by Pavlova and then by others like Sokolow and
Falkeinstein prompted some Mexican dancers and choreographers to
revalue the specificity of their culture for articulating representations
of the so-called human condition. They tacitly challenged the fact
that for centuries, artistic production in predominantly white countries
in the Western world had stood as the universal representative of
humanity. Those who attempted then, and those who attempt now,
to produce a dance form that could be recognized as Mexican but
at the same time speak universally still hoped to join the modern
world and its cultural stages. However, Mexican dancers mestizo
universalist efforts, then and now, often have led them to circulate
as auto-exoticized others within international dance circuits whose
aesthetic values are still predicated on the specificity of white Western
modernity.
Notes
1. I am deeply grateful to Susan Foster, Susan Manning, the anonymous reviewer, and
especially to Carrie Preston for their valuable comments at different stages during
the writing of this article.
2. Pavlova visited Mexico City from late January to late March in 1919 and for two
weeks in 1925.
3. Mestizo refers to bodies, subjects, and cultures that resulted from the mixing of
indigenous and European peoples during the Spanish conquest and colonization
of Mexico in the sixteen century.
4. Jarabe signifies a combination of different elements in the preparation of a syruplike remedy. Tapato refers to that which is from the state of Jalisco; however, like
a jarabe remedy, the dance combines movements, visual motifs, and musical tunes
from the sones of various regions throughout the country.
5. These choreographic descriptions are based on viewings of Pavlova performing The
Dying Swan in 1925, choreographed by Michel Fokine (1907); the dance maybe
seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMEBFhVMZpU
6. Translations from Spanish are my own. Anna Pavlowa es el divino genio de la danza,
la que ha coronado de rosas y de mirtos a Terpsicore, la sonriente diosa griega.; Qu
bellamente mueren los cisnes!; Luis A. Rodriguez, La Muerte del Cisne, El Universal
Ilustrado, Secc. Por Los Escenarios (Mexico: Marzo 14, 1919): 10, p. 10.

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Modernist Cultures
7. Ibid. p. 10. Tu alma es cosmopolita, tiene la exquisita pureza griega, la voluptuosidad del
Oriente, la galanura francesa del tiempo de los Luises [. . . ], la extravagancia y la locura
modernista, la sutileza del espiritualismo y la majestad intrnseca de lo clsico.
8. For a discussion of how the Ballet Russes launched a new Orientalism that
Henri Matisse and Paul Poiret helped consolidate in Europe through painting and
fashion respectively, see Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on TwentiethCentury Culture (London, New York: Verso, 1993), pp. 134. For analyses of how
orientalism functioned in St. Denis work both as a form of cultural imperialism and
as a foundation for the development of modern dance in the US, see respectively
Jane C. Desmond, Dancing out the Difference, Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St.
Deniss Rhadha of 1906, Signs 17. 1 (Autumn 1991): 2849 and Priya Srinivasan,
Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2012),
pp. 6782.
9. Walford Hyden, The Genius of Dance: Pavlova (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,
1931), pp. 1112.
10. Anna Pavlowa [sic], An Answer to Critics of the Ballet [undated], in Dance Magazine:
Portfolio produced by William Como and Richard Philp, January (New York: 1976):
4374, p. 65.
11. Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics 16. 1 (Spring,
1986): 227, p. 24.
12. Delia Salazar Anaya, Los Ricos en el Centenario, Proceso, Bi-Centenario: La Fiesta
Interrumpida, Fasciculos Coleccionables 6 (Mexico: Septiembre, 2009): 2033, pp.
2223.
13. Ibid. p. 23. Porfirista refers to Porfirio Diazs regime which ruled Mexico from
1876 to 1911 and against which the Mexican revolution ensued. esta miora migrante
y sus socios o competidores nacionales [. . . ] ejemplific el modelo de sociedad que la lite
porfirista supona haber delineado: un conjunto de polticas pblicas, inspiradas en el
positivismo fancs y britnico, tendientes a hacer de Mxico un pas ms moderno y ms
prspero, pero tambin ms blanco.
14. Tace Hedrick, Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture,
19001940 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press, 2003),
p. 5.
15. Rick A. Lpez, The Noche Mexicana and the Exhibition of Popular Arts: Two Ways
of Exalting Indianness, in The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution
in Mexico, 19201940, ed. Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2006): 2342, p. 23.
16. Ibid. p. 29.
17. Ibid. p. 28.
18. Honda belleza, pureza primitiva, inagotable e inexplorado. Phrases in quotations
are from Gonzalez Peas laudatory appraisal of Maugard who produced the
scenography and costumes for Fantasia Mexicana. Carlos Gonzalez Pea, Ana
Pavlowa y el Baile Popular Mexicano, El Universal, Secc. Cronicas de Arte de El
Universal (Mexico: Marzo 19, 1919): 3, p. 3.
19. Marta E. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press, 1995), p. 92.
20. Ibid. p. 141.
21. En la vida teatral de Mxico asistimos ahora a un fenmeno sorprendente: el arte se ha
transladado del Arbeu al Principal [. . . ] el Arbeu, ennoblecido por una tradicin de cultura,
dignificado por [una serie de figuras internacionales]. Y, al contrario, el Principal ese
teatro encallado por venticinco aos de genero chico, infamado por las piruetas de dos

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22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

generaciones de hetairas, y por la groceria de millares de obrucas en que la vulgaridad corria

pareja con la ausencia total de sentido comn purifica su ambiente abriendo las puertas a
esa maravilla de gracia alada, de luz, de genio diverso, que es el Arte de Anna Pavlowa [. . .
el cual] convertira en perfumes sutiles al menos por dos semanas las miasmas pestilentes
de esa vieja cloaca. Gonzalez Pea, Ana Pavlowa en el Principal: La Flauta Magica,
El Universal, Secc. Cronicas de Arte de El Universal (Mexico: Febrero 23, 1919): 3,
p. 3.
El Pueblo, Una Verdadera Lucha en la Plaza de El Toreo , El Pueblo (Mexico:
Enero 31, 1919): 7, p. 7. La genial Anna Pavlowa, El Universal, Plaza de Toros
El Toreo: Charlot, Don Jose y Su Botones. El Universal. Secc. Teatros y Cines
(Mexico: Marzo 8, 1919): 7, p. 7.
Susan Manning, Modern Dance in the Third Reich: Six Positions and a Coda
in Choreographing History, ed. Susan L. Foster (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995):
16576, p. 175. I am referring here not only to choreographic reconstructions
on stage but also on the written page as part of choreographing an argument.
When limited to only a few images and archival bits of textual information as
documentation, scholars have also relied on their own corporeal knowledge as
dancers to invent reconstructive methodologies that combine informed imagining
and whatever facts are available. These scholars have created hypothetical
characters in order to reconstruct and theorize about specific dances and dancers,
dance forms, and other cultural, phenomenological, and corporeal encounters. See
for example Savigliano, Tango; Lena Hammergren, The re-turn of the flneuse, in
Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture, and Power, ed. Susan L. Foster (London;
New York: Routledge, 1996): 5369; Priya Srinivasan, The Bodies Beneath the
Smoke or Whats Behind the Cigarette Poster: Unearthing Kinesthetic Connections
in American Dance History, Discourses in Dance 4. 1 (London: Summer 2007): 747.
The criticality of these imaginative reconstructive methodologies responds to
the conviction held by some dance scholars that dance embodies social codes
and conventions, thereby constituting an efficacious intervention within specific
historical and cultural contexts in which dances are produced and performed.
According to this approach, dance embodies explicit or implicit theories of
individual, collective, and/or artistic identities constituted by power relations
mediated by constructs such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. In other words, it
is in the dance that one can find the fusion of theory and practice in processes of
knowledge production, on stage and/or on the page. For a brief discussion on how
this approach to dance studies has been proposed, embraced, and challenged by
dance scholars in relation to terms such as choreography, kinesthesia and empathy,
see Susan L. Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London;
New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 114.
Josefina Lavalle, Anna Pavlova y El Jarabe Tapato, en La Danza en Mexico: Visiones
de Cinco Siglos, Vol. I, ed. Maya Ramos Smith and Patricia Cardona Lang (Mexico:
CONACULTA/INBA, 2002): 635650.
Eva Arreola, Eva Prez Caros niece, qtd. in Ibid. p. 647. la propia Eva le sugiri [a
Pavlova] realizarlos [pasos] sobre las puntas [de sus zapatillas]. La misma Pavlova prefiri
entonces bailarlo en puntas, pues le era menos difcil y al mismo tiempo no quera arriesgarse
a cualquier falseo o lastimadura al bailar aquellos pasos tan extraos para ella.
El Jarabe Tapato is a courtship dance performed by a charro, an elegant horseman
wearing a traditional attire including a large hat associated with the state of
Jalisco, and a china poblana, an iconic traditional female figure from the state of
Puebla.

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Modernist Cultures
27. Keith Money, Anna Pavlova: Her Life and Art (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, Inc., 1982),
p. 273.
28. These quotations, moscovita y celestial, mi raza palpita, precipita su sangre en un
bronco raudal, are from a poem referring to Pavlovas El Jarabe Tapato. Enrique
Fernndez Ledezma, El Universal Ilustrado (Mexico: Julio 31, 1919), p. 7.
29. Con los ojos puestos en el mundo externo, no nos habamos dado cuenta de la importancia
esttica del jarabe. Drama que realiza en su sencillez aparente todo un conflicto pasional
y pcaro a la vez, como el alma de nuestro pueblo. Quoted in Lavalle, Anna Pavlova,
p. 650.
30. Ibid. p. 650. aquella versin del jarabe que era mal vista por ser ejecutada por las tiples
mexicanas en las tandas de los teatros del gnero llgo a ser va Anna Pavlova el jarabe
oficial bailado por la niez mexicana como un emblema nacional, como el baile nacional y
mexicano por excelencia, aceptado por las autoridades educativas del pas como material
didctico de las escuelas. El Jarabe Tapato [. . . .] que, como [alguien dijo], deberia ser
llamdo, mas bien, jarabe oficial [. . . .] cuando lo encontramos ya establecido y respetable,
conviviendo en las fiestas con lo mejor de la sociedad.

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