La Bella Otero tour begins in Seville

Rubén Olmo has placed dance at the service of storytelling in order to achieve a fusion of styles — from folklore to flamenco and stylized dance — to tell, through dance, the story of a woman who reinvented herself after a tragic event in her childhood, triumphed as an artist and courtesan, and ended up ruined by gambling.

“Many years ago, before I had even begun my career as a choreographer, I found some postcards of La Bella Otero in a second-hand shop. When I discovered that one of the most famous women of her time came from a village in Pontevedra, I knew I had to create a ballet about her life. But I knew I needed the support of a major company in order to stage it as I imagined it, as a large-scale production; directing the Ballet Nacional de España has allowed me to make it a reality,” explains Rubén Olmo about the origin of his choreography.

“It is a very emotional and also dramatic show, because it tells the story of a woman who reached the very top and ended up alone and forgotten,” adds the director. The plot, dramatized by Gregor Acuña-Pohl, has selected some of the most significant moments in the artist’s biography that could be expressed through dance, without attempting to be exhaustive. To do so, the Seville-born actor and dance dramaturg researched the subject by reading press cuttings, books published about her and the autobiography in which she recounted her imaginary origins, and by watching the series and films made about her, although the work is not based on any one of them in particular. “I have tried to stay close to the historical figure and turn it into a ballet that moves the audience, without judging her. The most important thing for me was to show a person with great magnetism, charisma and strength.”

“After being performed for three weeks in Madrid last year, La Bella Otero is now a very mature show that I hope will have a long life after its visit to Seville, and that theatres in other cities in Spain and around the world will be encouraged to program it,” says Gregor Acuña-Pohl.

Granada-born dancer Patricia Guerrero is also very excited to return to this role at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville. “It is a role that I am passionate about and that gives me so many good things, so I am very happy to be able to bring this work to Seville with Rubén Olmo as a guest artist of the Ballet Nacional de España.” The young dancer and choreographer trained in the companies of Mario Maya and Rubén Olmo. She is currently a leading figure in avant-garde flamenco and received the National Dance Award for Performance in 2021. She shares La Bella Otero’s magnetism on stage, and admires her for her great self-confidence, survival instinct and charisma. “La Bella Otero is a work with a harsh underlying story, but it is dynamic, entertaining, fresh, and full of colour and energy, which will make us all enjoy it, both on and off stage,” she says.

To embody the protagonist in her later years, Rubén Olmo has counted on the special collaboration of Maribel Gallardo, répétiteur of the Ballet Nacional de España. “Taking up the character of Madame Otero again, beyond what it means to step into the shoes of such a fascinating woman despite her tragic life, means reliving the emotion of feeling the stage and the warmth of the audience. Unfortunately, the artistic life of a dancer is very short, and only rarely does life give you an opportunity like the one I am fortunately experiencing, intensely and gratefully,” says the Cádiz-born dancer.

Music, costumes, set design and lighting

The Royal Seville Symphony Orchestra will perform the score live at the Teatro de la Maestranza, conducted by Manuel Busto. The composer and conductor, originally from the Sevillian town of Los Palacios y Villafranca, has coordinated musicians from different styles who have composed the music for this ballet, integrating into the symphonic score he created the remaining compositions by Alejandro Cruz Benavides, Agustín Diassera, the group Rarefolk, and flamenco guitarists Diego Losada, Víctor Márquez, Enrique Bermúdez and Pau Vallet.

According to Manuel Busto: “La Bella Otero will be able to shine in the city of Seville for the first time with the original musical attire with which I conceived the score, in terms of orchestral forces, with flamenco musicians in the pit, and the live sounds of the bagpipe and the folk-rock group. All this will give this new presentation in Seville the energy of a premiere, with an orchestra and a theatre I know very well, where a unique magic always emerges for the artists, which the audience receives and amplifies.”

Alongside the creation of such a complex and varied score, another of the challenges of this dramatic ballet has been the design of the nearly 200 costumes needed to dress the dancers in such diverse periods and settings as a Galician village, Belle Époque Paris, or a café cantante. Canary Islands designer Yaiza Pinillos is especially proud of her personal reworking of the Byzantine-inspired, jewel-embroidered costume that La Bella Otero wears in one of her most iconic portraits. In addition to the difficulty of designing costumes that reflect a period while allowing the dancers to move and change easily between scenes, there is also the use of wigs, beards, moustaches and hats required to characterize the characters.

For set designer Eduardo Moreno, the challenge was to design a single architectural element that would help identify the time and place of each scene with only a few simple additions. The lighting designed by Juan Gómez-Cornejo, for its part, envelops the dancers, adding an emotional element to each setting.