Flamenco Dancer

In a Buenos Aires theatre last summer, white-haired Maestro Arturo Toscanini embraced a swart, black-haired, sloe-eyed dancer and cried: "Never in my life have I seen such fire and rhythm!" Platinum-haloed Maestro Leopold Stokowski, who knows fire and rhythm, got Dancer Carmen Amaya to give a special performance for him and his All American Youth Orchestra, willingly paid a fine for keeping the theatre open after midnight. Glossy-domed Impresario Sol Hurok, who knows a good thing even when he doesn't see it, signed up Carmen Amaya by cable for a U.S. visit.

Thus built up, Dancer Amaya arrived in Manhattan last month. Instead of launching her in a concert hall, Impresario Hurok turned her over to a Broadway restaurant, the Beachcomber (home of the multi-rummy Zombie), for $1,000 a week and a cut of the gross. Carmen Amaya makes about $2,000 a week, keeps the Beachcomber roaring with the oles of Manhattan's Latins. For she is a flamenco (gypsy), and the best in her line since Spain's late great La Argentina.

Gypsy Amaya's show--and pay roll-includes some of her sisters and her cousins (whom she reckons up by dozens), her father, uncle and brother: 16 flamencos in all. Flamenco Agustin Castellan Sabicas is a wonderful guitarist, and Uncle Sebastian Manzano (hairy and called El Pelao, the bald one) admits to having two wives and 18 children in Spain. It is Carmen Amaya who stops the show with the wrigglings of her round rump and wiry body, the tossings of her disheveled gypsy hair, the animal fury of her tough, splash-mouthed face. In the improvised measures of flamenco dances like the Soleares and Alegrias, never twice alike, Amaya's incredibly swift foot-stamps, finger-snappings and castanet-clacks are something to see and hear. "When I dance," says she, "my heart comes out of my mouth." Watchers can almost see it happen.

Carmen Amaya is about 19: her family cannot quite remember, and their notes on the subject differ. She began dancing for tourists when she was four, in the family cave in the gypsy quarter of Granada. The footloose Amayas took her to dance at the Barcelona exhibition when she was about seven, let her appear in Singer Raquel Meller's show in Paris a year later.

The whole tribe trooped to Buenos Aires soon after the Spanish Civil War began. Since then Carmen Amaya has toured all Latin America, made movies and pots of money. Like most gypsies, she lets the money slip, but she has invested a lot in diamonds and furs. Easygoing, she wears a dirty bathrobe about the house, with a silver fox cape to top it off. Her English thus far is " 'ello," "goo' night," "hokay," t'ank you." She has no aspirations towards formal Spanish dancing, says (in Spanish): "If I feel like jumping, I jump. If I feel like sitting, I sit." All Carmen Amaya really wants is "to be known as the greatest Spanish gypsy dancer in the world."

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