The button is activated play and Antonio’s voice The Dancer It sounds already worn out, although every word has the pride of the dance genius who did not need surnames to achieve glory. “I retired from my professional career in the city of Sapporo, Japan, in 1978,” he is heard saying over the grainy sound of an old cassette tape. It is the eighties of the 20th century and it is from then on that the unrepeatable artist declines and the character with a scandalous social life emerges, the meat of the first sensational programs on black and white television that was attracted to the incipient jet set Marbella and the futility of Spanish aristocratic life.
It is precisely in his house on the Costa del Sol, named jackhammerwhere Antonio, who had been everything in the performing arts and cinema between the forties and seventies of the last century, now retired, grants a long interview to a journalist, Santi Arriazu, which marked the final decline of a myth. “The management he made of the last years of his life was inversely proportional to the precision with which he had led his professional career. When the stage lights went out, the spotlights on the sets came on.” It is explained by filmmaker Paco Ortiz, director of the documentary Antonio, the dancer from Spainwhich premieres this Thursday in Seville, the artist’s hometown.
The film, which covers the amazing biography of Antonio Ruiz Soler, is crossed by the voice of the dance genius himself in the recordings of this interview that the journalist Santi Arriazu conducted with him between 1983 and 1984 for a well-known gossip magazine and that, due to the scandal of his statements, he was judicially seized following a complaint from the Casa de Alba. “I would only love, I loved and I will love one person, which was Cayetana. And I have lived with her one of the most beautiful, long, exciting and fruitful idylls that a person can live,” Antonio says at one point in the recording in reference to the Duchess of Alba, who was the fuse that lit the controversy that the entire country talked about for months.
Once the obstacles with justice were overcome, these interviews were published in a biographical book signed by the journalist himself, but the recordings made on more than a dozen cassette tapes that the filmmaker Paco Ortiz “considered lost” had never been recovered. “The surprise was when, after many inquiries, I located Santi Arriazu and he told me that he keeps them and that he lives in an area of the coast of Huelva very close to our own work environment.” This unpublished sound gem then becomes the plot line of the film, Antonio’s story told by Antonio, in an audiovisual work that aims to highlight a figure “who has not existed again, nor existed before” in the projection of Spanish dance in the world. “Antonio would be something like today’s Rosalía; the global phenomenon that always risks and triumphs. He changes his register and triumphs again,” says Ortiz.
However, despite his enormous contributions to Spanish dance – he was the creator of the martinete, a flamenco style reserved until then only for singing; He is the author of the famous Sarasate zapateado, he incorporated the studs that he had known on Broadway into the flamenco shoe to emphasize the heels…—, he ended up mistreated in the final period of his life: “He has been a frivolized figure since the seventies due to his sexual ambiguity, his relationships with the Spanish aristocracy and the world’s elites, and he has not gone down in history as the great artist that he was.” This is stated by the professor of social anthropology at the University of Seville, Cristina Cruces, at one point in the film. “We owe a lot to this dancer, bailaor, choreographer, businessman, artist and creator who raised the level of dance in our country. It was he who gave the impetus for the existence of a National Ballet, who designed unforgettable choreographies still in force for their great quality, and above all, the standard bearer of the recognition of flamenco and Spanish dance internationally,” he adds.
Another cancellation of this unique artist who plans for the documentary could have come due to his label as a Francoist artist, something that all the voices participating in the documentary categorically deny. Cruces, in fact, gives as an example his tour of the former Soviet Union, which he carried out in contravention of orders from the Regime, since there were no diplomatic relations with that country. “Antonio did basically whatever he wanted all his life,” says the professor.
These were still the glory years of an artist born from the streets, of whom a first recording is preserved at the age of eight in which he appears dancing in the Reales Alcázares of Seville in front of King Alfonso This documentary portrays “the man who improved the international face of a country that mostly projected dictatorship,” says its director: he acted in Hollywood films, had Charles Chaplin, Ava Gardner, Maria Callas and Mijaíl Barýshnikov himself among his fans, he promoted and directed the first National Ballet of Spain. Although they fired him arguing his problematic nature. “When you have been the only artist who has visited the great stages of the world, you have been invited to the Scala in Milan, you have triumphed in Paris and you have had Picasso himself surrender before you, the management of that must be very complicated; especially if you do not have anyone at your side to tell you: come down to earth, you are mortal,” the journalist and veteran dance critic Marta Carrasco reflects during the documentary.
Antonio’s life is typical of a fiction, birth, success, life at the peak and final decline until current oblivion. “In Spain we have no memory for our great names. We clearly forget those who have built art. And Antonio is a figure to reclaim, a figure that should represent us all.”