Conté de Loyo
She puts her best foot forward for the art of flamenco
09/19/99
By Joyce Saenz Harris
Conte de Loyo's regal carriage would do a queen of Castile proud.
Watch her in front of a mirrored wall, dancing slowly but with perfect control, and she could be a tai-chi master in top form. At a slightly faster pace, she resembles a haughty catwalk model, sensual and untouchable.
Shoulders back, head high, she moves to the rhythm of a seguiriya or a solea with a feline elegance that her neophyte students can but hope to copy. Such passion, the truly mystical feeling for flamenco, will come to them only with long experience.
Now the dancers begin to stamp and click their toes and heels on the North Dallas studio's worn hardwood floors, stepping forward, now backward, now sideways. Faster and faster they move, three alert pairs of eyes always upon the teacher as she leads them. Her arms lift and arch as gracefully as a swan's neck; her slender hands flutter like falling leaves.
"Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez!" Ms. de Loyo calls out, counting off the steps. She does a kick that brings her knee to hip level, then demonstrates a basic step sequence. "Y ahora," she commands, "dum-da-ga, diga-diga-dum . . ."
"Slow, quick and extend!"
"Mira aqui!" (Look here!)
"Uno y dos, mira!"
She works with each student on the finer points of a cambio or paseo. "You're anticipating the movement," she tells one. "Keep everything back. It's a statement, then."
They try again: seven-eight, nine-10. "Ba-bing! There!" Ms. de Loyo exclaims triumphantly. "That's the timing."
Teaching the art of flamenco is not easy, but Ms. de Loyo loves it. "It's a lot of work," she says during a juice break. "But the sense of accomplishment is overwhelming."
Her students agree. Says high school junior Elena Harvey Hurst, who at 16 began lessons this summer, "She gets you really involved. Learning flamenco can be frustrating because it's very difficult. But she will get you there. She is rigorous, but she never makes you feel that 'I'm not good at this.' "
Sandra Garratt, a former Dallas fashion designer now living in New York City, took years of lessons from Ms. de Loyo and has performed with her dance troupe. "It's like Kabuki theater, a very specific type of art form," Ms. Garratt says. "It changes your life. It can be a very powerful experience."
As North Texas' most prominent exponent of this traditional Spanish art form, Conte de Loyo will be at center stage on Sunday. That is when her second Dallas International Flamenco Festival concludes with a gala matinee at 3 p.m., in the Dallas Museum of Art's Horchow Auditorium. The show will include performances by top flamenco stars such as Spain's Antonio Hidalgo, Omayra Amaya, Joaquin Encinias, guitarist Bruce Patterson and singer Jesus Montoya, nicknamed el Genio Gitano (the Gypsy Dynamo).
It is a lonely task to stage flamenco in Dallas, a city that many artists say remains largely indifferent to its own Latin cultural heritage.
Every year, Ms. de Loyo hopes that some civic or corporate angel will step forward to help fund her tiny, struggling Flamenco Theatre. It seems her destiny to be one who keeps hoping against hope. For flamenco owns her corazon y alma - heart and soul.
When one is a true artist like Ms. de Loyo, says
Teatro Dallas founder Cora Cardona, "you have no choice, because you love
what you do. The obstacles are there, but you conquer them. Because you
have to achieve your goals."
Perhaps the most surprising fact about the
very Latin-seeming Ms. de Loyo is that she was born Dragitza Karamarkovich Kukich, the
daughter of Serbian immigrants, in Pittsburgh. (She says she kept the Loyo
surname from a brief, annulled marriage to a guitarist, and added "de"
for marquee appeal.)
With her dark eyes and hair, Ms. de Loyo blends easily into a Latin crowd. Her conversational Spanish is fluent and impeccably accented. Moreover, her many Hispanic friends consider her a true hermana, or sister, where it really counts: inside.
"You know, she's not Spanish," says Ms. Cardona. "But she's taken on this persona and this soul of la espana negra, the dark, southern Spaniard.
"She's a totally dedicated woman, down to the roots of her soul. It's almost mystical for her."
"She really has the spirit of flamenco in her soul," says Dr. Rodrigo Dominguez of San Antonio, who is a former Dallas physician and a native of southern Spain. "And she's not Spanish at all! But she lives for it. She personifies the flamenco itself.
"She has a vision that's more important than anything else in her life."
That vision began when the teenage Conte (a longtime nickname) saw Carmen Amaya, known to flamenco aficionados as "Queen of the Gypsies," perform at the Chateau Madrid in New York City.
"It was so powerful that it seized my very being," she recalls. "I started to study it, just so I could understand it . . . but it was all-consuming. It possessed me."
Ms. de Loyo says she was "extremely shy, terribly introverted." Flamenco gave her "an avenue of expression I'd never known. Now I could communicate without words."
Music had always been a part of her life. Her father, Theodore Kukich, was a guitarist who played with his band on weekends at the local Serbian social club in Pittsburgh. Her paternal grandfather crafted the lutelike tamboura that hangs (minus its four strings) on Ms. de Loyo's living-room wall.
Young Conte liked to dance, and with her three sisters and one brother, she learned all the Slavic dances: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian. She was "a tomboy" who played basketball, softball and paddle tennis at the local rec center.
"I didn't know what it was to be a girl till I was 15," she says. "Then it hit me." She split her free time between one group of "academic" friends and another group of teens who loved to go dancing.
Conte finished high school early, with one handicap: "I was 16 going on 17, and I looked 14." She moved to New York, taught ballroom dancing at commercial dance studios, and continued her flamenco studies with "a man who didn't really know how to teach women."
As a result, she absorbed an assertive dance style, sometimes even dressing the part of a man in a nightclub flamenco act with two other women students. The more feminine aspects of her technique came later, as she studied with other teachers.
In New York, she joined the chorus of Extravaganza Latina, a dance troupe about to leave on a fortnight's tour of St. Louis. The two weeks turned into six weeks, and Ms. de Loyo reveled in watching the stars of the show.
When the St. Louis gig ended, she accompanied
a girlfriend, who was another American in the dance troupe, home to visit
Fresno, Calif. When Ms. de Loyo got off the bus, California was "so beautiful,
with the palm trees and the stucco houses, that - well," she says with
a shrug, "I never went back to New York."
After three years in San Francisco, studying
with the noted dancers Ciro and Pepa Reyes, Ms. de Loyo headed to Spain
in 1964 and worked with Antonio Marin. He got her an audition with Amalia
Roman, a Sevillian diva who was famous for dancing the taranto with castanets.
Ms. de Loyo's audition happened unexpectedly, when Ms. Roman showed up with her entourage. Imperiously, Ms. Roman seated herself and ordered Ms. de Loyo to dance for her.
Caught unprepared, without even her proper dance shoes, Ms. de Loyo did not dare defy the diva. So she began as usual, with the llamada - the traditional "calling" or stage-entrance steps - consisting of three quick stamps.
To her horror, one of her dressy street pumps' high heels went right through the fragile old floor. But she recovered quickly, improvised and continued.
"That was it. I got the job," Ms. de Loyo says. "With the gypsies, it's all the art of improvisation."
She found, with gratitude and delight, that the Spaniards she met treated her like family. Amalia Roman traded castanet lessons for Ms. de Loyo's English lessons; fellow dancers were quick to help the newcomer and to introduce her to other performers. She stayed in Spain for a year, ''and each moment was more blessed than the last. The places, the people, the friends I made."
Thus began the informal network that has helped
her bring many of flamenco's stars to Dallas. Ms. de Loyo has "connections
in international circles," says Sally C. Llewellyn, a Flamenco Theatre
board member. "And it would benefit Dallas to support her and bring these
artists to town. She has spent a lifetime developing these connections."
After returning to California, Ms. de Loyo
worked again with Ciro before finding her longtime performance partner,
Teodoro Morca. Their work received raves from The New York Times, Los Angeles
Times and Dance magazine. From 1965 to 1970, they performed at prestigious
dance festivals such as Jacob's Pillow in the Massachusetts Berkshires.
When the two dancers went their separate ways, Ms. de Loyo felt ready to launch her solo career. But in October 1970, as she rode in a taxi on her way to sign a contract with the William Morris Agency, the cab was rear-ended on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.
Ms. de Loyo suffered severe whiplash and chip fractures in her neck and spine, and the fifth metatarsal in her right foot was broken. She spent nearly a year in recovery, unable to dance and with no income.
"It got," she understates, "real scary."
She underwent "endless" therapies and treatments, but eventually decided conventional medicine did her more harm than good. "I felt like a guinea pig," she says.
Ms. de Loyo says she hasn't taken so much as an aspirin since 1980 and appears in excellent health, with the lithe figure and high energy of a woman one-third her age. Though she grew up in the Serbian Orthodox Church, she now follows Christian Science, which largely relies on the power of prayer for healing.
After recovering from the accident, Ms. de Loyo needed a job to pay her debts. As it turned out, it would be 15 years before she danced professionally again.
Her search for a regular paycheck took her to the casting department at Paramount's television division, working as casting agent on shows such as Mannix, Happy Days, The Brady Bunch and The Odd Couple. She then worked at CBS, at the famous old Selznick studios, and with Tom Laughlin of Billy Jack fame.
After five years in the casting business, however, Ms. de Loyo was burned out, "and my health was really shot." She began a health regimen using Shaklee products, which led her to selling them. That in turn led her to selling another line of aloe vera skin-care products.
In 1985, the skin-care company offered her the vice presidency of marketing, a job that would mean moving to Dallas and being on the road three weeks out of four. It was a difficult choice for her to make.
But, call it luck or fate, the move that brought
her to Dallas also brought her back to dance.
In the mid-1980s, the Dallas Ballet was under
the artistic direction of Flemming Flindt, who worked with his wife, Vivi.
When the Flindts brought in Jose de Udaeta to choreograph El Toreador for
the ballet, Ms. de Loyo decided, with some trepidation, to attend a workshop.
It was like a reunion with an old lover. "That was the first time in so long that my heart went, 'Thump!' " Ms. de Loyo told The Dallas Morning News in 1994. "I had been like the walking dead. But I didn't know until I started dancing again how unhappy I'd been."
Mr. de Udaeta immediately recognized that this was no ordinary student. He brought Ms. de Loyo up to the front of the class, and afterward the Flindts asked her to teach flamenco to the company. That began her odyssey back home to the stage.
Ever since then, she has been working with her own dance company, teaching classes and performing. The dressed-for-success businesswoman became an artist living in a small Oak Lawn apartment that might, from its appearance, be home to a struggling graduate student. Once again, she is living a life with far more spiritual than financial rewards.
There are moments of glory, of course. Her fans remember her playing the non-dancing role of the Queen in the Dallas Ballet's production of Swan Lake, moving with such grace that "you felt you were in the presence of royalty," says Allen L. Oliver III, president of Flamenco Theatre's board.
Ms. de Loyo also performed on an international telecast for the opening ceremonies of the 1994 World Cup festivities in Dallas. In 1994, she was spotlighted in a national TV ad for Kellogg cereals, dancing to "Wild Thing."
But this year has been a tough one. Flamenco Theatre suffers from the same syndrome as other Latin performing-arts groups in Dallas: a general lack of consistent support from the community, even from fellow Hispanics and their businesses.
"They don't understand the platform that the arts create for their product," says Anita N. Martinez, a former Dallas City Council member and founder of Ballet Folklorico. "This is a dignified and respectful way to showcase Spanish culture. We need their support and we just don't get it.
"It's very heart-wrenching and frustrating."
Ms. Martinez thinks the problem will not be solved until Dallas Hispanics exercise more power at the ballot box and find political champions on the council and in the Texas Legislature. Like Ms. de Loyo and Ms. Cardona, she would like to see Dallas' proposed Latin cultural-arts center move along at a less glacial pace.
"I don't see much embracing of our own culture. To me, it's sad," says Mr. Oliver. "At [Flamenco Theatre] performances, the house goes wild. But then we don't hear from them again."
He and Sally Llewellyn form the core of Ms. de Loyo's board and are among her most committed volunteers. Other helpers tend to come and go, often at the worst possible time.
For example, four days before the first Festival Flamenco, held at Strictly Ballroom in May 1998, most of Flamenco Theatre's volunteers dropped out without warning. That was the only time, Mr. Oliver says, that he ever has seen the exquisitely well-mannered and patient Ms. de Loyo "lose her cool. It was like Armageddon." But then, he says, she simply calmed down, went back and worked harder than ever on the festival.
When she steps onstage Sunday afternoon at the DMA, Conte de Loyo will make magic once again. After all, she says, anyone who really wants to can learn to express emotion with the most basic of instruments: the human body.
"Have you lived life? Do you have something to
say?" she asks. "Then you can do it in flamenco."
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Conte de Loyo Flamenco Theatre
Sammons Center for the Arts
3630 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas, Texas 75219
214.521.0222
214.559.4643 fax
flamenco@flash.net
www.flash.net/~flamenco
"I started to study flamenco dance,just so I could understant it ...
but it was all-consuming. It possessed me." Conté de Loyo
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at flamenco@flash.net