Pilar
Serrano recalls the terror and struggle of winning a place on stage. Everybody is awkward at age 12, and Serrano felt
stiffer than the rest. She was born to perform, she had to perform, she would
perform. She just had the rest of the world to convince. Serrano made her first
nervous steps in public with the help of Juanjo Linares, a performer, teacher,
and currently choreographer with the National Ballet of Spain. “He was the only
one who was saying, `Yes, she can do something,'” Serrano recalls. “Because
nobody believed in me at that time. But he did. He said, `This is a diamond.
We’ll have to work at it. But it will be bright someday.'” Se�or Linares
was right. After several years of obsessive footwork, Serrano built a career
with the renowned Jos� Greco Company, emerging as the star of
productions like last year’s Duende del Flamenco.
That should be enough romance for one life, but in the meantime she’s married
a Spanish Count — better known as Texas developer Joaquin de Monet — made a
new home in Austin, and is mounting her first production as director. “My
feeling about Austin is that there is something about this city that’s magical.
It’s full of beautiful angels. They’re looking at us and helping us…. I’ve
been working all over the world, and in Austin the people are so enthusiastic,
like nowhere else.” Of course, the troupe director is supposed to say that sort
of thing on every stop. But something about the smooth timbre of her voice and
her girlish smile make me believe her.
Pasi�n de Espa�a runs through July 6 at the Capitol City
Playhouse, and Serrano needs her angels. She feels the old terror and struggle
as she anticipates opening night. She hasn’t performed in a year and worries,
“When I put my first foot on the stage, I’ll be scared. I’m wondering how the
audience will react. I’m wondering, what is going to be my reaction?” Her
reputation suggests these are little more than jitters. Lambros Lambrou of
Ballet Austin describes Serrano with an aphorism: “All performers have courage
to a certain degree and then there are those who are courageous — Pilar is
courageous.”
And she won’t be alone. Besides a faithful local crowd that’s watched her
bloom over the last five years, Jos� Greco himself is flying in for the
show, and Juanjo Linares has been in residence here for several weeks,
rehearsing Spanish classical and folk dances for the show. The
pasi�n in this crowd is more than a label. When Se�or
Linares tells me in Spanish that he loves Serrano like a daughter and will do
anything for her and her family, she is digging in a closet for props, but
suddenly she straightens up to grip his shoulder. He doesn’t stop talking, he
doesn’t look toward her, but it’s clear he feels her touch.
Serrano was born in a small town outside Barcelona and started dancing at
seven, when her family moved to Madrid. Working with Linares from age 12 to 17,
she concentrated on the flamenco, honing her campas, or rhythm, and lacing an
innate energy with techniques from classical dance. It’s a blend that Sylvia
Keprta, who directs FlamencoAustin as the flamboyant Sylviana, still finds in
Serrano’s moves. “She has such a clean, particular sense of gesture. You can
see the classical elements of her dance. It fits her personality.”
Serrano’s break came when she joined the Greco company for her first
professional job in Morocco. “It was unbelievable, someone was paying me to do
what I had been paying for.” Going pro meant more than long hours and pressure;
for Serrano it meant a change of identity. Her patronymic was Pilar
Rospid�, but Greco — a Bronx native who had assumed his stage name to
capitalize on a Spanish craze in the 1950s — said Rospid� wasn’t
flamenco enough. They decided to use her grandmother’s maiden name, Serrano,
instead. She’s married now, so Pilar de Monet, born Rospid� and working
as Serrano, has to remind herself which Pilar is on. “I have this confusion:
Who am I? But mainly, I close my eyes and dance,” she says, still sweaty and
hyped from a post-rehearsal endorphin rush.
Serrano saw New York City for the first time with Jos� Greco and
learned from a master showman. “I was nobody in the company, not even a solo or
anything, but I was watching everyone. When Jos� Greco walked on stage,
everything was going crazy. I was amazed, a man with charisma like that and
what he’s able to do.” Serrano was more than amazed, she was edified. She found
her own light when Greco’s daughter left the company and Greco II, known as
Pep�, needed a partner for duets. Pilar and Pep� ran a troubled
and ultimately doomed romance offstage, but their dances stole show after show.
Austin audiences first saw Serrano and the Greco entourage by a lucky
accident. Capitol City Playhouse artistic director Michel Jaroschy says that he
caught the Maria Benitez company doing flamenco dance at a lunch for a local
production of the opera Carmen. Benitez sold out a week of shows for Cap City
and was supposed to return the next year, but she was sick and Greco took the
dates instead. After packed houses during that week, Jaroschy instituted the
month-long runs that have become a summer staple in Austin. The rumor mill says
Greco and Jaroschy had such an intense friction that Greco refused to come back
this year, but those same mills say that Greco has finally entered a deserved,
if unofficial, retirement after 60 years of work.
Jaroschy remains committed to bringing Spanish dance here. “It’s an important
cultural event,” he says. “In the Sixties, we were all distancing ourselves,
saying, `This is who we are now and that’s what counts.’ In the Sixties, we
were trying to assimilate. In the Nineties, we’re going back to recognize the
importance of these individual traditions and what they have to offer.” Domingo
Chavez, an actor moonlighting as stage manager for Pasi�n de Espana,
agrees. “I had never seen flamenco except on television. But for the Hispanic
who comes to the show, it’s gonna tingle them from the inside.” Chavez extends
a burly arm that responds as if on cue with goosebumps. “Not that we’re usually
into flamenco, but it’s in the root of the tree we all come from. It’s a
romance, head over heels.” Turning to Serrano, he looks for corroboration, and
she nods, placing her small fingers on the back of Chavez’s hand. “Yes,” she
says, “that is the passion.”
Like Chavez, I’m an acolyte in the flamenco world. But we’re surrounded by
willing teachers talking with evangelical fervor. Serrano is drawn to flamenco
by “the freedom. It’s a dance full of feelings, you give of yourself…
Obviously, you have a choreography, but sometimes you’re looking at the guitar
and saying, `Just keep playing.’ I’ve said that so many times. For some reason,
the magic is there and it’s coming to you, and it’s coming to the musicians,
too, the audience is giving to you something, and you just say, `Keep playing
because we’re going to keep dancing.’ And you stay there until you finish or
the audience says, `Hey, go back. That’s enough.'”
I get a chance to see this during an afternoon that’s more like a jam session
than a rehearsal. Serrano and the band (two guitarists, two singers, and a
pianist) are working on the show’s climax, a solea that starts as a dry
lamentation and works toward a wail. Serrano shows the musicians a set of steps
and they offer some chords to complement her moves; or they suggest a
transition or crescendo to drive the dance. Around the small room, the band is
hanging out. Jes�s Torres takes off his shirt and props his guitar on
its back against his knees. Luis Vargas, one of the singers, pulls on a
cigarette between swigs from a tall-boy Budweiser and cracks jokes. He looks
amazingly like Richard from Melrose Place, and he doesn’t seem to be paying
attention, but when his cue arrives, Vargas puts away boyish things and
wails.
In the middle of the wisecracks, experiments, and false starts, Serrano
remains in control. It helps that the band is sitting down while she paces in
high heels and a floor-length black skirt, correcting, encouraging, and
directing like a veteran. In the middle of the song, she stops the band and
points toward Torres, for him to watch her feet. “Ta-tum ta-tum ta-tum! Si?”
Torres nods and plays the lick.
These days, there are more women than ever heading their own flamenco troupes:
Sylviana in Austin, Maria Benitez with an unquestionable resum�, Carmen
Cortez, Pilar Rioja. Serrano says the trend will continue, “maybe because men
have always had control and now women are coming up… Maria has done it for
years, and more of us now are saying it’s our turn.” Right now, in Austin,
who’s in charge is secondary. Right now, there’s a show to do. “I’m the
director, yes, but I still need the men, and all the other dancers, the men and
the women. We all make up the company. They just give you that name,
director.”
Serrano concentrates on the day-to-day realities of mounting a production —
costumes, studio rental, and marketing, besides the obligatory 10-hour
rehearsal days. Two local restaurants, Serrano’s and Pulpo Loco, are helping
out, but her main patron is closer at hand. Joaquin de Monet got involved with
Austin dance when Cap City approached him about supporting the Jos�
Greco visits. According to Jaroschy, he told de Monet, “I don’t really know
you, or what you’d need in return, but I need $10,000.” De Monet answered, “I
don’t know you either, but I’m going to give you the money. You invite me to
things I might be interested in.” Serrano met her husband-to-be over lunch with
other people from the show, and went away struck, although unsure. Her
relationship with Pep� Greco was breaking up, but she thought de Monet
was married. He was, in fact, divorced, and after exchanging letters, de Monet
and Serrano met in Reno last October. He proposed to her in Austin in November,
and they were married in March this year. While pasi�n clearly
helped along this whirlwind affair, Serrano sees a pragmatic basis for her new
love. “To be involved with someone in dance is too much. You live for dancing,
you breathe it, but you need a rest, someone in real life.”
It’s hard to say how real Serrano is willing to be. She contemplates her
future with vacillations. “Sometimes I think about having babies… but I don’t
know how to work and do that, too.” She doesn’t think she has the patience for
teaching or the business tilt for promoting. She remains “made for the stage,”
whatever the demands and momentary discomfort. “Dancing is painful,” she says,
holding up a foot covered with calluses still in the blister stage because of
the year off. “There is something after rehearsal. There’s the sweat and pain,
but I’m happy, because I know there’s going to be a reward at the end: the
show.” n Pilar Serrano’s Pasi�n de Espa�a runs through July 6 at Capitol
City Playhouse.
Brett Holloway-Reeves is Director of Community Programming for KVRX and is at
work on a book about white-collar crime.
This article appears in June 14 • 1996 and June 14 • 1996 (Cover).