Admiring la Argentina

Wearing a long white dress, his face powdered, his black bob topped with a floral hat, Kazuo Ohno pays homage to the flamenco dancer Antonia Mercé in his emblematic solo ‘Hommage à La Argentina’.

With a mental click, the Japanese dancer Kazuo Ohno appears: long white dress, face powdered, a black bob topped with a floral hat. Admiring la Argentina, his emblematic solo devised in 1977 (when he was 71), brought Ohno international fame, and he performed it for over twenty years.

In 1926 he watched a flamenco show featuring the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé, known as ‘La Argentina’. 50 years later in 1977, when he attended an exhibition by his friend Natsuyuki Nakanishi, he froze in front of a painting, recognising behind the splashes of colour and abstract lines the face of Antonia Mercé, the inspiration for his famous solo.

His dress and his face share the same crumpled, fragile appearance, the costume being an extension of the fragile body of the dancer and his character, La Argentina; reciprocally, this cross-dressing reveals the old man’s body as well as that of the great dancer to whom he pays homage.

Source : Maison de la Danse de Lyon