The military uprising surprised Carmen Amaya while she was in Valladolid, in the middle of a tour which was due to include performances from the north to the south of the country.Įverything was interrupted at that point. Spaniards’ lives would never again be the same after that fateful day. This succession of events in 1935 meant that the Roma flamenco dancer became well known in every corner of Spain.īut then, all of a sudden, war erupted on 18 July 1936. He went on to direct fifteen more feature films with Carmen, the last of which – Los Tarantos – she would not see finished. The film, entitled La hija de Juan Simón, was directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia. This was made possible by the director Luis Buñuel, who at that time was the executive producer of the Filmofono production company. Her next step – which was typical of famous artists of the time – was to make the leap to cinema. From here, she went on to other theatres such as La Zarzuela and Fontalba, where she shared the stage with the most prestigious artists of the age such as Concha Piquer and Miguel de Molina. She proved a great success: for weeks on end every seat in the theatre was filled with people wanting to see Carmen dance solo, only accompanied by ten guitarists. After spending a short time in small tablaos and nightclubs, the businessman Juan Carcellé hired her for his next show and formally presented her at the Coliseum in Madrid. This was enough to convince father and daughter to set off for the Spanish capital.
The guitarist Sabicas, who at the time was one of the few artists on the Spanish art scene who understood flamenco, convinced her father to leave Barcelona: Her arrival in Madrid, however, came all the more quickly. Thus, the prestigious dancer Vicente Escudero wanted to incorporate her into his dance company and present her in the USA however, this proved impossible because she was not old enough, and so her debut on American soil was postponed for a few years.
‘Your girl has something that needs to be taken very seriously but here it will lead to nothing.’Īt this point in her life, Carmen’s fame and reputation in flamenco dancing crossed borders, and everyone, whether critics, professionals or aficionados longed to discover her merits. They would give one performance daily, then continued by night at other nearby cafés cantantes, as they had always done, until daybreak. Thousands of visitors flocked to the international pavilions, which included Pabellón Andaluz, where guitarist Miguel Borrull ran a tablao and hired the Amaya family with La Capitana as the main attraction. In 1929 the World’s Fair was held in Barcelona.
The four-year-old girl would sing and dance to the sound of her father’s guitar, and once the performance was over he would pass his hat around the audience. Accompanied by her father, a guitarist nicknamed ‘El Chino’, they would wander through the districts of El Paralelo and Las Ramblas every night until dawn. Carmen’s talent for singing and dancing come to light at an early age, a point which marked the end of her childhood. It was in this peripheral location, specifically in Barracks 475, that the great Roma dancer Carmen Amaya Amaya came into the world as the daughter of José Amaya and Micaela Amaya Moreno. It was a suburb seldom frequented by the people of Barcelona, who considered it dangerous territory – a form of atavistic prejudice that inevitably extends itself to all Roma settlements.
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, El Somorrostro was a beach on the outskirts of Barcelona, full of humble and dilapidated barracks which were inhabited mostly by Roma.
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