Postcard of the week ending
Saturday, 27 July 2002

Consuelo Tortajada (1867-1957)
Spanish dancer

Madame La Tortajada


Consuelo Tortajada

(photo: unknown, circa 1904)

This real photograph postcard of La Tortajada was published about 1904 by A. & G. Taylor of London, no.359 in the Reality series. According to the Guia de Granada she made her debut in a Parisian variety theatre at the age of 15, subsequently marrying Ramon Tortajada who became her artistic director.

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‘La Belle Tortajada, whose private name was Consuelo Hernandez, one of the great international dance and music-halls stars of the Edwardian era, has died, at the age of 90, at Granada, Spain, her native town to which she retired in 1913. Contemporary with la Belle Otero and Cleo de Merode, the strikingly beautiful and talented La Belle Tortajada was a familiar attraction in all of Europe’s capitals…’
(The Times, London, Monday, 4 March 1957, p.10d)

La Tortajada

Advertisement for the Alhambra, Leicester Square, London,
showing the bill for the week beginning Monday, 7 August 1899

(The Era, London, Saturday, 5 August 1899, p.14d)

Although The Times ends its obituary of La Tortajada by stating that her London debut was at the Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1902, it is clear from the above advertisement that she was appearing in the British capital as early as the summer of 1899 if not before.

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‘Tortajada. - And at the same time one of the old favourites of the Spanish-cum-dancer brigade is making a novel triumph in London. Goodness knows the Alhambra programme needed some livening up, and Madame Tortajada, most staple of attractions at the big Leicester square house, has come ably to the rescue.
‘She appears in a little sketch dealing with bull-fighting, flimsy enough in itself, but dignified by her act into something very well worth the watching.
‘Tortajada is rather different to Otero and the other recognised Spanish beauties. To begin with she is a great deal more artistic, and to go on with she is blonde. One would hardly take her for a Spaniard at first sight. Rather more she is like a woman from the South of Germany - without the sluggard movements of the women of that part of Europe.
‘She is uncommonly handsome, uncommonly graceful, and withal possessing a genius of creation. She is no performer of "arranged" dances, a dancing master’s pretty puppet, encased in a £100 frock, and adorned with £15,000 of jewellery. Nor is she particularly a pet of the paragraphers. You don’t read of her amazing toilettes at Ostend, Monte Carlo, or in the Bois de Boulogne. You have never heard of idiots who shot themselves for hopeless love of her outside the stage door. She is just a very clever, handsome woman who has her art at heart and can afford to despise any cheap advertisement and sensational aids to popularity.
‘Possibly I have erred in the preceding paragraph, and I venture to pick myself up. I spoke of puppets and £100 frocks. Madame Tortajada is no puppet, but her dresses - well a hundred pounds ought to cover the cost of one of them.
‘She has had a long experience of the stage. She is a born dancer, beginning as a little one whose legs made measures from sheer natural desire and love of the thing. She can only remember, if you ask her, that "she has danced all her life." She began doing it professionally at Vienna, and subsequently made a most successful tour of America. She has of course danced in all the big cities of Europe, but says, with every inflection of sincerity, that she prefers, of all places, to play in London. She considers London audiences the most faithful of all audiences, never at fever heat of applause one night, and ice-cold another. Also she likes to live in London - right in the middle worry and hum of it!’
(Up To Date, London, Saturday, 1 June 1901, p3a)

La Tortajada

La Tortajada

(photo: unknown, circa 1904)

‘Spanish dancing has been made familiar to French and English audiences by several dancers of repute, of whom the best known are Carmencita, Otero, Guerrero and Tortajada. There are some kinds of dancing, however, which are untranslatable into the terms of the art of other countries. The Spanish dance is intensely national. The snapping of the castanets, the short and insolent skirt, the exciting rhythm of the music, do not alone suffice for the performance of the jota or the fandango, as some foreign artists would appear to suppose; nor even when the dancer has caught the trick of the swaying of the hips, the lightning of the eyes, the arched back and provocative gestures, has she caught the spirit of the dance. She must first transform herself into a Spaniard. The Spanish dance depends almost wholly on personality…
‘La Tortajada is a figure well known both in London and in America. Her style is not representative of the purest type of Spanish dancing, as it is apt to be infected with the atmosphere of the music-hall. Her personality, moreover, is far less interesting than that of La Carmencita. She was born in Granada, and her aim is to bring the warmth and colour of the sun of meridional Spain into her dancing - to dance, in fact, as she expressed it, "la danse ensoleillée."
‘"America," she sayes in a naïve account of her career, "has fêted me and showered dollars on me by the handful. Millionaires in particularly have given me a great ‘réclame,’ among them Pierpont Morgan, Astor and Vanderbilt. The latter gave me a thousand collars to dance one Christmas Day. Another American, Mr Taft, the future President, made a bet that I was taller than another woman well known to the public. He was at the pains of coming himself to measure me, and having won the five thousand dollars, he at once purchased a magnificent piece of jewellery with them which he offered to me. If the millionaires fêted me, so also did the poorest citizens of the Republic, the humble Sioux, who are still to be found in some of the wilder regions. While making a motor tour in the district of the immense pine forests for the benefit of my health, I fell in with some of these fine fellows and the idea suddenly occurred to me that I would dance specially for them. My husband and I improvised a stage and thereupon I danced my most voluptuous flamenca, which at first terrified but soon afterwards delighted them. I was royally rewarded, for the chief made me a present of some gold dust and a purse fashioned out of serpent’s skin… But the most curious spectators that I have known were three thousand Zulus whom I came across when motoring back from Johannesburg. Unlike the Sioux, they did not look on at my dance in silent admiration. No sooner had I begun to dance than the Zulus commenced to caper about all around me. Nothing could have been more picturesque, and at the same time more ludicrous, then the sight of a white woman in a mantilla appearing as mistress of the revels in a negro orgy!"
‘[Rosario] Guerrero is perhaps a more impassioned dancer than La Tortajada, but she has strayed even further from the purity of the Spanish dance…’
(J.E. Crawford Flitch, Modern Dancing and Dancers, Grant Richards Ltd, London and Philadelphia, 1912, pp.195-198)

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© John Culme, 2002