By Bonnie Proudfoot

It’s a warm spring evening on La Rambla, a street leading from the Port of Barcelona into the main city, a wide avenue lined with trees, shops, and restaurants, thin lanes of traffic, and a center island full of people strolling or dining outdoors. It begins to drizzle as we join a group on a narrow sidewalk. The queue flows forward, bottlenecking at a doorway leading into a foyer, barely wide enough for a ticket-taker and a sandwich-board sign advertising featured performers. We are at Tablao Flamenco Cordobes. Photos and reviews line the walls, and our group heads upstairs into a small, crowded, circular theater, arched stucco walls stenciled with Moorish motifs, rows of wooden chairs arranged between pillars around a small stage (tablao). We are offered a glass of sweet, dark sangria. The house lights dim.

And so, it begins. Two male guitarists and two percussionists whose wooden sticks rhythmically strike the floor are seated under an archway at the rear of the tablao. Just out of sight, a tenor (el cante) begins to sing. His tones rise and fall, stretching out syllables as if his vocal cords merged with the vibrato of a violin, as if he is almost weeping. As the song concludes, from behind the archway, a woman with long dark hair steps forward. She wears a tight, sleeveless, bodice, a fringed, knotted shawl, ruffled skirt slightly raised in the front. In deliberate, high steps, clapping her hands as if to gather both the tempo and the audience, she circles the stage, skirt flaring, boot heels accenting the percussion. It is impossible to look away.

      As a match in the fingers first glows white
      then bursts into tongues of flame that flare,
      in the ring of spectators it seems to ignite,
      with blistering heat, abrupt and bright;
      her spinning dance seeks to spread like fire.

      And suddenly it is wholly aflame.

      With a look she kindles her hair just the same,
      and at once flings, with an artist’s daring,
      her whole dress into passionate flaring

So begins the poem “The Spanish Dancer,” (translated here by Joseph Cadora in Rilke’s New Poems, Copper Canyon, 2017), Rainer Maria Rilke’s depiction of both a flamenco dancer’s kinesthetic energy and the impact of flamenco on the poet/observer. The poem can be called ekphrastic, a poem that both represents and draws from an encounter with (visual, auditory or performance) art. Here, Rilke engages artistically with the intensity of la bailaora, the dancer, revealing how the dance itself, the space created around the dancer, as well as the dancer’s gestures and swirls, her clapping and stamping, combine to create a heightened artistic experience.

Rilke develops imagery of a flamenco performance, the “ring of spectators,” the energy of the “spinning dance,” starting as if striking a match, the embodiment of the flame in the physicality of the dancer building in intensity. The fire can be seen to be a kinetic energy emanating from and consuming the dancer, whose performance allows her to be both the source of flame and to release that energy into the world: her “bare arms / flash like startled snakes / clapping and stretching.” At the final stanza, we see a turn in the poem (beginning with “And then”), that continues the central metaphor of dance as fire, although now it has become almost “too much to abide,” with “flames still raging, conceding no space.” With a gesture of power and satisfaction, Rilke’s poem parallels the performance, finding closure as the dancer’s “firm feet” stamp out the flames.

Diane Oatley calls flamenco “the embodiment of yearning, impassioned struggle, and transformation” created by the dancer as she forms a type of “liminal space” that establishes a “visceral plane of being” around the performance. Garcia Lorca mentions the “duende” as this “force of change.” Flamenco performance is traced to a blending of the musical culture of the Gitano population that immigrated to Andalucía around 1425, with regional musical traditions, including Romani dance gitano baile in the 1700s. During its golden age from 1869–1910, flamenco acquired its present form. Rilke observed a performance, likely in 1906, that shared many aspects of flamenco viewed today.

What brought Rilke, born and raised in Prague, into contact with flamenco? In 1903 the poet moved to Paris, having accepted a commission for a monograph about the artistic evolution of the sculptor Rodin. Rilke spent years interviewing Rodin. The 61-year-old sculptor became a mentor to the 26-year-old poet. Eventually Rilke lived at Rodin’s estate and became Rodin’s secretary, organizing the sculptor’s papers and correspondence. Rilke’s own poetics shifted to reflect what he learned about the potential for art at Rodin’s studio, and his engagement with the Parisian art world deepened. He attended exhibits, wrote about the work of Post-Impressionist painters like Cezanne and Van Gogh, and completed two volumes—New Poems, 1907 and New Poems [1908] The Other Part.

Although Rilke had opportunities to view paintings of flamenco dancers, Robert Vilain in his 2017 article “A Poem, A Dancer, and A Painting: Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Spanische Tanzerin’” reveals that in April of 1906, Rilke watched a performance of flamenco including a guitarist as well as a female dancer (bailaora) named Carmela at the Paris home of the Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga during Zuloaga’s son’s christening celebration. Vilain relates that, among others, Edgar Degas was present, with the composer Isaac Albeniz at the piano. Rilke wrote to his wife Clara that he missed the church service but attended the party, relating specifics about Carmela’s dance. Although Zuloaga had exhibited portraits of flamenco dancers, Vilain argues that Rilke’s letter to Clara is enough confirmation that the poet was present to see the dance firsthand.

For Vilain, it is not a stretch to read aspects of “Spanish Dancer” as a meta-poem, a way for Rilke to address the creative process: first a spark of inspiration that is generated through the vividness of studying the subject; next, a flare up of associative ideas, a “fire” of creative engagement; and finally, a dramatic closure, an act of formal containment, an awareness of a type of “artistic” victory. Those who read Rilke will see that throughout his career he has used the image of a flame to stand in for a certain aspect of the creative intuition. In Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke writes:

      Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
      where everything shines as it disappears.
      The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
      as the curve of the body as it turns away.

For readers who wish to follow up on the connection between Rilke and Rodin, a 2016 book Rachel Corbett entitled You Must Change Your Life (W. W. Norton, 2022), follows the friendship/mentorship between the sculptor and poet. Additionally, a series of recent articles about Rilke and Rodin can be found on the Poetry Foundation website, including an in-depth essay by the poet W. S. Di Piero (“Only Collect”). Di Piero confirms, “During those four years [from 1903–07, Rilke had] worked to develop an equivalent in poetry to things he watched Rodin make. He was turning . . . toward a poetry fresh (to use the kind of language he favored) with its own thing-ness.” It was this absorption into the everyday world that informed the subjects of Rilke’s New Poems: a panther behind bars at the zoo, children on a merry-go-round, a Spanish dancer, two views of the archaic torso of Apollo. Di Piero connects the aesthetic developed by Rilke to the cultural sweep shaping art in Paris: “I can’t think of any instance when Rilke came anywhere near the boldness of regard for the nude that Picasso was already achieving in 1901,” Di Piero writes, “but the formal construction of his great poem ‘The Spanish Dancer’ has a similar circular energy. Like Picasso’s little picture, it wraps itself around itself as the dancer, whom Rilke compares to a struck match, masters the metaphor she has become and, after flaring and burning, finally stamps out the little conflagration of her dance beneath her feet.”

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Bonnie Proudfoot’s work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. Her novel, Goshen Road, received the 2022 WCONA Book of the Year and was long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway Award. Her poetry chapbook, Household Gods, was published in 2022 by Sheila-Na-Gig. A poetry collection, Incomer, is forthcoming from Shadelandhouse Modern Press. She lives in Athens, Ohio.