• Somorrostro.The literary spark

The history of La Singla plays all kinds: an art that revolutionized flamenco dance, and pointed it out as Carmen Amaya's successor ; an incredible desire to excel, motivated by a childhood of misery and silence, and even a double disappearance. Antonia Singla Contreras not only disappeared from the scene, in the mid-1970s, when she was an internationally recognized star, but no one remembered her, despite everything. Despite having danced throughout Europe; despite having participated, while still a child, in Los Tarantos (1963), the legendary film by Rovira-Beleta, which reached the doors of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film (won 8 and a half, Fellini's masterpiece), and despite the fact that the hundreds of photographs taken by Colita (or Xavier Miserachs) have been exhibited in museums around the world.

La Singla was an icon buried in oblivion, until, finally, Paloma Zapata became interested in her. He discovered it investigating for his previous documentary, Peret, I am the rumba (2018), since the King of the Catalan Rumba had been a guitarist for La Singla. In Los Tarantos, without going any further, petite and full of grace, she dances El garrotín . In love with her art and history , Zapata went to look for her at her retirement in Santa Coloma de Gramanet, on the outskirts of Barcelona, ​​where she has spent the last 40 years far from public light.

Why didn't anyone go looking for her all this time? The filmmaker has a theory: "She was a gypsy in a time when there was even more racism than now, and she was also a woman. In many artistic disciplines, there are women who have been erased from history, and this is one more case, that racism adds up. And besides, she has never wanted to know anything about her glory years. They are memories that are too painful for her. " After multiple setbacks, coronavirus through, the documentary, which will be called La Singla. Breaking the silence , it will begin filming in September, before the next confinement.

DANCE IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR

La Singla, who was born approximately in 1948 - it is not known exactly - , became deaf after a few months, as a result of meningitis, or perhaps due to some congenital factor since it was not the first case in her large family. In an interview published in La Vanguardia in 1962, it is especially Rosa, her mother, who speaks: "When the girl was 11 years old, I saw her dancing in front of a mirror, and as she did well, I said to myself:" This girl it makes sense, "and I took her to the doctor. The doctor said the girl could hear and speak, and you see it: hear and speak." La Singla spent her childhood surrounded by silence, but she began to hear a little, and learned to speak self-taught , with a pencil in her mouth. Zapata says that currently, "La Singla must have 15% hearing. When I talk to her, she reads my lips ."

Rosa showed her visually, clapping her hands and snapping her fingers, the different flamenco styles, and took her to dance in the taverns. The Singla was guided by the vibrations of the bass sounds, and it ended up being her, with her furious tapping, the one who would lead the way to the many guitarists who accompanied her. La Singla was a creative motor, and his style, so masculine that he often danced in pants, something not very common then, was so instinctive, and loaded with drama that it dynamited the orthodoxy of flamenco dance. That was how the one they called "La Múa" in her native Somorrostro ended up making her way, and became La Singla, one of the greatest dancers in history.

FROM THE SHADOW TO THE GLORY

El Somorrostro, where the Singla was born in 1948, was a shanty town, which stood where the Twin Towers of 92 - the Hotel Arts and the Mapfre Tower - stand today, until it was swept away on the eve of a visit by Francisco Franco , arrived to contemplate some naval maneuvers, in 1966. There La Singla met the famous Colita, future portrait painter of the Gauche Divine , who then debuted photographing the figuration of Los Tarantos: "Paco Rebés, who then represented her, introduced me to her and He introduced her to the world of professional dance. I immediately understood the strength and beauty of her dance, "recalls Colita. " His outburst, his desire and his innocence drew attention . As a photographer, he seemed to me to be a stage animal with a strange and unknown photogeny . I was very fond of him and gave him what he did best: my photos." Everyone loved La Singla. The Dalí people invited her to dance to their house in Port Lligat, and Joan Miró painted her some photographs, which were later stolen from her by one of their supposed representatives.

THE FATHER AS A SHADOW

Pierre Antoine El Singla , father of Antoñita and of an unbeatable number of offspring, did not live in the Somorrostro. "He had two families, and lived with the other in the south of France. He was illiterate, but someone showed him a newspaper in which his daughter, who was beginning to become famous, appeared and she came to take over the business," Zapata explains. . " Her management was disastrous . She was an authoritarian person, and she did not let her relate to anyone. The setting ended up being for her as a form of therapy, the only place where she could express herself." Colita goes even further: " the father acted as if it were his property . He came to exploit her financially and, incidentally, mistreat her. At that moment we distanced ourselves, and to his disgrace he was the one who took over his work."

EUROPE AT YOUR FEET

La Singla left Barcelona behind, and was welcomed at the tablao Los Califas, in Madrid, where it triumphed again, and from there to all of Europe as headliner of the Gypsy Flamenco Festival, organized by the German promoters Lippmann & Rau, who also organized a festival to the stars of the blues -Muddy Waters, Lonnie Johnson, John Lee Hooker ...- on the stages of Germany, France and Great Britain. Following the same model, and taking advantage of the circuit of theaters, they did the same with what in the eyes of the world is still our particular blues: flamenco. For four consecutive years, La Singla led the procession through thirty European cities, in rooms full of thousands of enthusiastic spectators. The Germans were clear: she was "the best bailaora in the world".

But La Singla was not happy, and in the mid-1970s, as Zapata recounted, " she married a good man, whose name is Antonio, like her, and retired to Santa Coloma, where she continues, with a fragile heart and fear of leaving to the street, with which she is falling. She had a thyroid problem, but I think she psychosomatized everything she had suffered , and that she went through a severe depression that put her in bed. It is significant that, for four decades, there has been no wanted to know nothing more about all that. " Born in misery, deaf, female and gypsy, La Singla's life was not easy. But the world has to know how great she became, and this documentary will finally shed light on her forgotten figure.

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