In the sixth chapter of K. Meira Goldberg's Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco, a still image flickers into luminous, noisy life (154). The image is a screenshot, from footage shot by Russian choreographer Leonid Massine in 1917, in a summer spent touring Spain with Serge Diaghilev and Manuel de Falla in preparation for a new Ballets Russes work on a Spanish theme. Massine had recently acquired a sixteen-millimeter camera, and he used it to capture the movements of the renowned dancer La Macarrona, acclaimed for her performance at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, but here dancing on a rooftop in a more familiar setting. Sonidos Negros includes three screenshots from the film, the “only film of Macarrona's dancing,” and “one of the most important extant records of this early period of flamenco dance” (153); the images themselves are compelling, but it takes a reader with Goldberg's dual background as a practitioner and an interdisciplinary, collaborative scholar to bring these grainy, silent images to crackling life. Goldberg painstakingly identifies the various shadowy figures in the screenshots, drawing upon an in-depth knowledge of performance practices and characters during the period; she pinpoints the various palos or dance styles, referring to dance manuals, historical accounts, and her own practice. Then, unexpectedly, she deduces their musical rhythm, and she does so, more unexpectedly still, by reaching out to another artist, as we read in footnote 29: “Guitarist Curro de María, looking at the guitarists’ hands, helped me identify the rhythms and tonalities” (239). Not content to stop at incorporating the acoustic detail into her written research, Goldberg mentions a footnote later that she has “added a rhythm soundtrack of palmas and a visual box showing the counts to the first and third Macarrona clips, at both 50% and 100% speed (which is slowed down slightly to compensate for the fewer frames per second in 1917 film technology). The modified clips have been donated and will be available at the New York Library for the Performing Arts” (Ibid.). These two footnotes speak volumes about the kind of research behind this extraordinary piece of dance scholarship: it is at one and the same time historical, technical, creative, corporeal, musical, visual, and collaborative, and it is as generous as it will undoubtedly be generative.

Sonidos Negros draws upon its author's many years of dance practice, but also her research across several centuries of literary texts, dance manuals, performance paraphernalia, visual records, and musical scores from different but interlocking geographical sites. Ostensibly focused on flamenco, the book's canvas stretches far beyond what the reader might expect; it offers a mapping of dance practices to and fro across the black and brown Atlantic, detailing the negotiations around issues of race, class, gender, and empire being worked out in under-studied forms of dance. Sonidos Negros brings those movements back to life by rescuing them and putting them in their temporal and spatial context—a context, often, of forced migrations—showing us not just the now, but the before and after of a gesture. Like Susan Jones's (Reference Jones2013, 156) insistent reading of Kurtz's African mistress's gesture as a movement-sequence rather than a still image, Goldberg's readings insist on dance's inscription in the places and histories from which it emerges, its generation of future responses and responsibilities. This is dance scholarship at its liveliest and most resonant, an interdisciplinary, multisite sounding of a chain of texts and images and stories for their movements, their transmissions, their eloquent equivocations. What emerges, in Goldberg's clear and vibrant writing, is a history of Spanish—but not only Spanish—dance in its entanglements with questions of race, religion, class, ethnicity, geopolitics, pain, and pleasure.

The title of Goldberg's book is drawn from poet Federico García Lorca's resonant meditations on duende, on the event of performance as it produces a bond between performer and public.Footnote ¹ Lorca's term has been much cited in recent work in performance studies. Less noted is the fact that it emerged at the intersection of blackness and gitanoness, as Lorca reflected from Cuba on both his recent experiences in Harlem and on his recently published Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads, 1928), whose romantic investment in the Andalusian gitano was mercilessly pilloried by his college friends Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, their eyes and artistic ambitions turned north toward Paris. What might seem an anecdotal or accidental coincidence of blackness and gitanería is revealed by Goldberg's penetrating scholarship to be threaded through transatlantic history, through Spain's colonial projects, through its policing of its own population, and through its desire to firm up its footing on the European stage. Entangled in its ambitions were the need to at once play down and ramp up its cultural difference, drawing upon local forms in performance which couldn't help but reveal their diverse historical roots. Sonidos Negros shows how these disparate ethnic strands were braided together in arrivals from East and West, North and South, traveling and mutating and finding new publics and practitioners from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.

The book's early chapters trace the figure of the ungainly bobo or bumpkin as he leaps across the pages of early modern texts: a figure for civic rambunctiousness, for religious heterodoxy, for racial ambiguity, his dance gradually performs its own pacification, allowing him to subject himself to the norms of Catholic Spain. In subsequent centuries, this figure would broaden his appeal, appearing in the “indigenous” dance forms developed and performed—often in tandem with “renegade and exotic crazes” entering from the Americas—over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The latter was also the heyday of French travels to both the Orient and Spain, and Goldberg carefully unpacks the irony whereby Spain drew upon peculiarly local forms to insert itself into a European context, only to find itself Orientalized by northern Europeans: an Orientalization which was also an Africanization (11)—the country pushed southward and eastward, reversing the course of its history of migrations, repeating its own expulsions. As Spanish intellectuals wrestled with this question over the course of a century, debating the desirability of flamenco as a national form (97), the form itself continued to be influenced by arrivals from West and East, as blackface minstrelsy crossed the Atlantic, its trickster-figures meshing with the Spanish dancing bobo and the Italian Harlequin, itself performed in blackface (115). There were other enmeshments at play involving the shifting place of dance, which found itself entangled with other forms such as bullfighting and acrobatics in the context of circuses and international exhibitions (131).

These latter enmeshments come to the fore in two tour-de-force chapters in the second half of the book: one on La Macarrona, whom we have already met, the other on “el negro Meri,” a still little-known figure mesmerizing for his leaps and for his racial equivocations. (As early chapters have taught us to see, the two are entwined.) Goldberg notes the tremendous irony, grounded in prior expectations, whereby the blackness of the first male flamenco dancer to be captured on film—by the Lumiere brothers in 1900 at Paris's Exposition Universelle—not only went unremarked but indeed unnoticed (130). Goldberg's research here dovetails with work by film scholar Kiko Mora; the collaboration between the two leads to a series of dizzying discoveries about this dancer's prior history, his likely Afro-Cuban ancestry, his collaborations with French dancer Chocolat (144–147), and his fusion of performance sources in emergent varieties of flamenco. Goldberg's unpacking of the convergence of dance and bullfighting suggests that this is not merely a knee-jerk connection of stereotyped Spanish forms, but the outcome of an intricate performance history threaded through the equestrian circuses which became popular in the nineteenth century (140). This history surely flickers in the background of “La Argentina,” Antonia Mercé's signature Corrida dance, in which she gesturally performed the opposing subject-positions of bullfighter and bull. The dance was choreographed for her during her first Paris season at the Moulin Rouge in 1910 by her fellow performers Antonio de Bilbao and “Mojigango”; in the latter's generic stage name is encrypted the “mojiganga,” which Goldberg describes as a parodic dance performed as an interlude in bullfights (138), featuring the leaps and acrobatics performed by dancers such as the Afro-Cuban father of Spanish flamenco, artist El Negro Meri.

Sonidos negros prompts us to hear these kinds of resonances, to dig into the tangled roots of modern and modernist art forms and practices, to listen for their mutations and borrowings and resistances across times and across contested spaces. It will be a critical addition not only to flamenco studies, but to a growing body of transatlantic performance scholarship by authors such as Paul Gilroy, Joseph Roach, Robert Farris Thompson, Florencia Garramuño, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and Barbara Fuchs. It is worth underlining, in closing, that it's a beautifully written book: while making space for all the lively, equivocating, mutable gestures which swarm across its pages—creating a stage for bulla—it's always attentive to narrative style, always concerned to shape those gestures into a movement sequence. Throughout its pages, the dancing body animates history.