Female flamenco dancer |
| Name:Pastora Rojas Monje |
| Birth: 1889 Sevilla |
"This is mine (the way of moving her arms). This is nobody else's. It is a gift that God gave me, because nobody, nobody, has been able to move their arms like me. I inherited it from my mother, la Mejorana".
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Pastora Imperio is one of the innovators of flamenco dancing. It cannot be denied that it was she who introduced two developments that are still very much in use: she generalised her habit of dancing with the bata de cola (tailed gown, a special costume for dancing) and, furthermore, she imposed her way of moving her arms as a model for arm movements in flamenco. The gracefulness of this part of her body has been one of the most admired elements of her dancing, something that she herself claimed to have inherited from her mother Rosario La Mejorana, who is considered the best female dancer in the nineteenth century. Some go so far as to claim that she was the first female flamenco dancer to raise her arms when she danced.
In Pastora Imperio's lengthy artistic career, which includes numerous tours of Europe and America, "El Amor Brujo", which she interpreted twice, stands out. The first version was written for her by Manuel de Falla. She performed it without too much success in the year 1915. She later took part in another version, alongside La Argentinita and Vicente Escudero in 1934, achieving a memorable success. She managed her own tablao in Madrid, El Duende (1964), from where she continued to keep in touch with the flamenco scene once she had retired.
Pastora Imperio's dancing was praised by several generations of intellectuals and artists: Antonio Machado, the Álvarez Quintero brothers, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Francisco Villaespesa, Jacinto Benavente, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Julio Romero de Torres, Mariano Benlliure and Eugenio Noel, a professed anti-flamencoist. She starred in nine films during her artistic career. Some of them are: "La Danza Fatal" (1914), "La Reina de una Raza" (1917), María de la O (1936), La Marquesona (1940), "¡Canelita en Rama!" (1943), "El Amor Brujo" (1949) and "Duelo en la Cañada" (1959). |
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Flamencos en los archivos de RTVE. Vol. 6
