2023-06-18 06:03:41
“How is it possible that she dances the way she dances?” asks the photographer Colita. The astonishment, what less, is shared. Because, indeed, how is it possible? She was almost deaf from birth, hit by poverty and the sticky humidity of the Somorrostro since she was a girl, and yet she is a force of nature. Portent of the dance The Sinhala, Gypsy from the slums of Barcelona and the best dancer in the world. Or at least that’s what they said in Germany, where the promoters Lippmann & Rau made her the star of the Gypsy Flamenco Festival. On the poster, a very young Paco de Lucía and her. Antonia. Antonita. The Singla. “Gypsy dance and jaleo paintings have more admirers among the German public every day,” celebrates the newscast of the time while La Singla, pure fire, stamps hard. With rage. Spitting fire out of her mouth and putting it out with her feet, as he said of her Jean Cocteau.
On the beach, in the Somorrostro barracks, it was ‘La Mua’, but tablaos and stages made her a legend. “Her ‘siguiriyas’ of hers have not and have not had a comparison, not even with the great Carmen, with Amaya”, the press celebrated in 1967. That same year she went on tour with Ella Fitzgerald and performed before thousands of people all over Europe, but as soon as the 1970s arrived, La Singla disappeared. Her star went out and oblivion engulfed her. She went from rubbing shoulders with Dali and Miró from sharing filming with Carmen Amaya, to nothing. And there, of course, was a story.
That’s exactly what he thought dove shoe when he was working on his documentary about Peret and the rumbero’s granddaughter told him about a deaf bailaora who dazzled in the sixties and immediately vanished. She was born like this what she would end up being ‘The Single’, documentary that recovers and recomposes the amazing and tragic life of the bailaora.
From Somorrostro to stardom
The tape, which passed at the end of May through the DocsBarcelona, follow the footsteps of Antonia Singla from her native Somorrostro to her ‘retirement’ in Santa Coloma de Gramanet. Along the way, a story of rise, fall, and energetic heel-clicking. From early stardom, international fame and sudden fade to black. “I had never seen anyone dance like that before, which is why it is so strange to me that I have never heard of La Singla before,” says actress Helena Kaittani, narrator of the documentary.
Antonia’s story begins at the end of the forties in the Somorrostro from Barcelona: that’s where he was born in 1948 (or 1949, the figures show) among shacks and shacks and that’s also where it became clear that something wasn’t going well. «Eight days after his birth, the strange movements that he made with his head frightened me. I understood then that she was in terrible pain, and I took her to several doctors. Some said that she had suffered from meningitis, but this was not true. The fact is that they all agreed to tell me that the girl would be deaf and dumb. First I despaired; then I started fighting to save her. Dr. Ramos gave me the last hope: ‘perhaps she will start talking when she is seven or eight years old, otherwise she will remain mute forever,’” Rosa, La Singla’s mother, would remember years later.
La Singla, photographed by Xavier Miserachs
Without hearing or speaking, La Singla withdrew into herself. Her mother taught her flamenco styles snapping fingers and she learned to dance by looking in the mirror. “Are you hungry? So she dances », they told him in bars and taverns when he was eight years old. And she, of course, danced. With courage. Furiously. In order not to lose her rhythm, she would pay attention to the guitarist’s hand. And in the vibrations. In the end, it would be she who would set the pace, wild and fast, for the musicians.
At 17, La Singla is already a star. A dazzling flamenco supernova. She has danced with Carmen Amaya on the set of ‘The Tarantos’ and rubs shoulders with artists and bohemians. Miró dedicates drawings of her to her, Gala and Dalí invite her to Portlligat to see her dance up close, Colita and Xavier Miserachs they photograph her in full dancing trance… It is said that La Capitana even anointed her as her successor just before she died in 1963.
«The girl at that time was deaf and mute, but she danced like an angel from heaven», said Fritz Rau, a German promoter who, together with his partner Horst Lippman, signed her for the Berlin Gypsy Flamenco Festival. In Madrid, the Los Califas tablao is not immune to her talent either and she surrenders to the art of La Singla. In Europe, the bailaora has been touring around thirty cities for four years: she has planted her flagship in the Paris Olympia and paves the way for Camarón, Paco de Lucía, Pepe Habichuela and El Lebrijano.
loneliness and silence
In the mid-sixties, the success of La Singla quickly crossed the continent and it didn’t take long for it to reach the ears of his father, Pierre Antoine ‘El Singla’, a dark guy for whom everything is summed up in a single word: money. He lives in the south of France with a parallel family, but as soon as he sees a photo of his daughter in the newspaper, he packs his bags to take over the business. Things, of course, end fatally: authoritarian and greedy, he takes her away from his environment, stops his social activity dead and rejects good contracts due to his ignorance of the sector.
La Singla, with Dalí and Gala in Portlligat
La Singla continues stomping furiously, but her star suddenly melts. And she is wiped off the map. Simple as that. Or maybe not so much. In his investigations, Zapata reconstructs the bailaora’s story by drawing on the thread of the archives of Colita and Francisco Benegas, her former representative, and ends up reaching Santa Coloma de Gramanet, where the bailaora parked her sadness years ago. “Since I was little I was always sad, but I always had a smile,” says La Singla almost at the end of the tape.
“I have never been happy,” he insists since his retirement. A depression kept her in bed for six years. Pain, anguish, loneliness. She burned almost all the bridges and she never wanted to look back. Maybe because her art was really therapy after all. A way to scare away evils. To shake off the pain.
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