Dancing for propaganda: the analysis and interpretation of the integrated musical numbers performed in Ronda Española (1952).

Abstract

The Hungarian film director László Vajda Weisz (1906-1965) produced in 1952 Spanish Serenade (Ronda Española), a musical film with diegetic performances of Coros y Danzas de España, a very famous group of young girls who was part of the Francoist Women Union Sección Femenina. In spite of the innocent plot that the film shows, the integrated musical numbers are examples of a musical performance as communication, with a strong propaganda character which needs to be analysed and to be interpreted with a ethnomusicological, performance and gender context of the Spanish fascism dictatorialship after the II Worl War. The dances were performed only by girls, the members of the group Coros y Danzas, and the plot was the adaptation of the travel book Dancing to the South Cross (Bailando hasta la Cruz del Sur, 1948) by the falangist writer and journalist Rafael García Serrano (1917-1988), who described the first trip of Coros y Danzas group to Argentina and Brasil in 1949 with very successful performances. The book and the film have a high propaganda level, since the diverse Spanish regional dancing performed in different theatres of Peru, Chile, Venezuela and Brasil were cautivated (and even converted) the Spanish community in exile in those countries (because of Francoist dictatorialship) by the innocent girls performing Basque, Catalan, Cantabrian or Galician folk dances. The analysis of those musical numbers will show us that the manipulation of the Spanish popular and folk tradition was a weapon used during those days of dictatorialship.