THE GARDENS OF ANUNCIA - Lincoln Center Theater Review

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2023, Issue Number 79 Lincoln Center Theater Review Staff Jenna Clark Embrey, Executive Editor Charlotte Strick, Design Jenny Pouech, Picture Editor Carla Benton, Copy Editor Lincoln Center Theater Board of Directors Kewsong Lee, Chair David F. Solomon, President Jonathan Z. Cohen, Jane Lisman Katz, Robert Pohly, and John W. Rowe, Vice Chairs James-Keith Brown, Chair, Executive Committee Marlene Hess, Treasurer Brooke Garber Neidich, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Annette Tapert Allen Allison M. Blinken Judith Byrd H. Rodgin Cohen Ida Cole Ide Dangoor Shari Eberts Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Cathy Barancik Graham David J. Greenwald J. Tomilson Hill, Chair Emeritus Judith Hiltz Sandra H. Hoffen Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chair Emeritus Raymond Joabar Mitch Julis Eric Kuhn Betsy Kenny Lack

Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram Scott M. Mills Eric M. Mindich, Chair Emeritus John Morning Elyse Newhouse Rusty O'Kelley Andrew J. Peck Katharine J. Rayner Bruce Rosenblum Stephanie Shuman Laura Speyer Maria Tash Electra Toub Leonard Tow, Vice Chair Emeritus Tracey T. Travis David Warren William Zabel, Vice Chair Emeritus

John B. Beinecke, Chair Emeritus John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Memrie M. Lewis, Augustus K. Oliver, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, and Daryl Roth, Honorary Trustees Hon. John V. Lindsay, Founding Chair Bernard Gersten, Founding Executive Producer The Rosenthal Family Foundation— Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors— is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

Additional support is provided by the David C. Horn Foundation.

Our deepest appreciation for the support provided to the Lincoln Center Theater Review by the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at the Lincoln Center Theater.

To subscribe to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

Front Cover illustration: The Gift © Jim Tsinganos; (This page from top right) Juan Perón stamp © Hipix/ Alamy; Eva Perón stamp © NormaZaro/E+/Getty Images; Argentine flower stamps © Neftali/Alamy, Tango © Jose AS Reyes/Shutterstock (Opposite page) Leaf illustration by 0melapics on Freepik; Back cover photo collage: Vinca seed packet—approx 1930, Tango dance steps (detail) © dikobraziy/iStock/Getty Images © 2023 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Issue 79

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR JENNA CLARK EMBREY 3 FANTASIA ON A LIFE: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL JOHN LACHIUSA 5 THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: A CONVERSATION WITH GRACIELA DANIELE 8 CULTIVATING A LEGACY IN THE GARDEN AMANDA PARRISH MORGAN 13 NOSTALGIA FOR THE PERÓNS? MICHAEL T. LUONGO 16 GIRLHOOD CECILY PARKS 19

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

About the act of growing things, the writer and environmental activist Wendell Berry said, “We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?” As an avid gardener and lifelong artist, director-choreographer Graciela Daniele knows the truth: we are in constant collaboration with nature and the life cycles around us never stop.

There is never enough time, and yet we continue to move through it. It is against this background that Michael John LaChiusa has set his latest musical, The Gardens of Anuncia—a love song to Daniele, his longtime friend and collaborator, and the people and places that helped her grow into the person who she is today.

Graciela Daniele will be a familiar name for our audiences. The first woman to hold the position of director-in-residence at Lincoln Center Theater, Daniele has directed and choreographed eight shows on these stages; The Gardens of Anuncia will be her ninth. Many of those shows have been in collaboration with LaChiusa, who shares the genesis of his new piece in this issue of the Lincoln Center Review. It’s easy to see why LaChiusa would find inspiration in Daniele’s life—her career is the stuff of legends. From her childhood as a flatfooted baby ballerina in Buenos Aires, to working as Bob Fosse’s dance captain and Michael Bennett’s assistant, to her numerous Drama Desk and Tony award nominations, Daniele has charted a course all her own. The Goodbye Girl, The Rink, Zorba, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Once on This Island are among her works that found their home on Broadway, but it’s her childhood in Argentina that set the stage for it all. Daniele detailed this magical start in a 1996 interview with former executive editor of the Lincoln Center Review Anne Cattaneo, which we have reprinted in this issue.

Writer Amanda Parrish Morgan also offers us a meditation on gardening and generations, and a look at how our memories of childhood echo into daily life.

In The Gardens of Anuncia, we see young Anuncia guided by three incredible women: her Tía, Granmama, and Mamí. These women educate and protect Anuncia, and their caregiving is a radical act in the face of a country that teeters on the brink of change. There is, of course, another female figure that hovers over Anuncia’s childhood in 1940s Argentina: Eva Perón. In this issue, journalist Michael Luongo takes us through the complicated nostalgia for the Perón regime, and the ways in which Eva and her husband Juan’s image and influence can still be felt in Argentina today.

As LaChiusa says in these pages, The Gardens of Anuncia is intended as an act of gratitude. It is fitting then that Daniele’s nickname, “Grazie,” immediately evokes the spirit of thanks. The seeds of LaChiusa and Daniele’s friendship were planted here in the halls and rehearsal rooms and stages of Lincoln Center Theater, and we are thankful to join as witnesses to the fruits of their labor.

Jenna Clark Embrey

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL JOHN LACHIUSA

LIKE HIS LEGENDARY FRIEND

Graciela Daniele, whom he set out to celebrate in The Gardens of Anuncia, Michael John LaChiusa has also long been a multi-hyphenate force in the world of musical theater. Prior to starting rehearsals, LaChiusa sat down with Jenna Clark Embrey to discuss his decadeslong collaboration with Daniele, how he began to develop The Gardens of Anuncia, and why he sees this piece as a meditation on giving thanks.

JENNA CLARK EMBREY How did you first begin working with Graciela Daniele?

MICHAEL JOHN LACHIUSA I was introduced to Graciela through my dear friend and mentor, Ira Weitzman. He had met Graciela during his time at Playwrights Horizons, before he came to Lincoln Center Theater. When Graciela was appointed as director-in-residence at Lincoln Center Theater, Ira asked her to bring him any ideas she had for new projects. Graciela brought him Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, thinking it would make a great chamber musical. At that point Ira played matchmaker. I hadn’t met Graciela, but I knew of her reputation and her legendary career.

So, Ira asked me to take a look at La Ronde, which I hadn’t read since I was a kid. I ended up writing the first scene and an opening number called “Hello Again” within the week; went over to Ira’s office and played it for him. He told me, “Okay, you better not write any more songs until you meet Graciela.” A few days later, Ira, Graciela, and I got together. I played the opening number for her, and she screamed. That was it; I was off and started writing. And that show became Hello Again, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theater in 1993. Thanks to Ira, Graciela and I have been friends and collaborators ever since.

That’s why The Gardens of Anuncia feels like we’ve come full circle—it’s almost exactly thirty years after that first show together.

JCE Where did that first collaboration then lead the two of you?

MJL There’s been so many other projects; you’ll have to fact-check me! At Lincoln Center Theater, after Hello Again, we’ve done Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marie Christine with Audra McDonald, and Bernarda Alba.

JCE And how did the idea for The Gardens of Anuncia come about?

MJL When you know someone that long, you learn their stories, you learn their histories.

Her path to becoming a director and choreographer, that’s fascinating to me. She’s done it all on her own terms. I was fascinated by Grazie’s childhood, growing up in Argentina and becoming a very successful dancer at the Teatro Colón, then heading off to Europe to perform ballet before coming to America to study “jazz dance,” as they called it back then. She would tell me stories about her grandmother, her mother, her aunt.

I was fascinated by these three women who raised this remarkable creature known as Graciela Daniele. These women raised her, nurtured her, protected her, and they did it while living in Perón’s Argentina, under the government of a tyrant. How does a child survive that? It’s because of the women who tended to her.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

(Previous page) Graciela Daniele and Michael John LaChiusa © K. C. Alfred / San Diego Union Tribune / ZUMA Press; (left) Anthony Crivello and Audra McDonald in Marie Christine, photo by Joan Marcus; (below) Nikki M. James and company in a scene from Lincoln Center Theater's production of Bernarda Alba.

Photo by Paul Kolnik.

(Left) Carolee Carmello and Donna Murphy in Hello Again, photo by Joan Marcus; (below) Judy Blazer, Saundra Santiago, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Sally Murphy and Nikki M. James in Bernarda Alba, a musical with words and music by Michael John LaChuisa and direction and choreography by Graciela Daniele at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. Photo

by Paul Kolnik.

A few years ago, I invited her to come and speak to one of the writing classes I was teaching at Columbia University. While talking to the students, she told a story about her childhood I’d never heard before. After the class, we went to get our drink—vodka martini, very dry, three olives— and I said, “Where did that story come from? I thought I knew everything!” I told her right then and there that I was going to go home and set her life to music, all these stories.

JCE And what did Graciela say to that?

MJL She said, “You’re not going to do that!” But I went home that night and wrote what became the opening number to The Gardens of Anuncia. I shared it with her and said, “Now is the time to tell me to either stop or keep going.” And she said to keep going, but she asked me to promise not to make it about her. I lied and told her “of course.”

Ultimately, I did keep my promise because the story really is about the three women who raised her. It’s not a biomusical; it’s more a fantasia on a life, a riff on a memory play. It’s based on a real life and real stories, but there’s an element of magic to it as well.

JCE And the character isn’t literally named Graciela Daniele; she's Anuncia.

MJL Graciela was born on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which we often laugh about— if you’re Catholic, then you’d understand. Now, the Immaculate Conception is a theological idea, and a little too sketchy for me. So, I decided to switch holidays. I love the Feast of the Annunciation; I think it’s a powerful tale. The Annunciation is the story about how the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and asks her—if she would be willing to carry the son of God. Mary is given the choice to accept this gift or not. I thought that this tied into the show: making choices as to what to do with your gift. If you are given a gift, say, the gift of dance or painting, do you accept it and bear all the responsibilities of having that gift? Or do you refuse it and deal with those consequences? In that way, “Anuncia” felt like the right name to give the character.

JCE How did you decide what to musicalize in this show, and what to leave as spoken dialogue?

MJL How to choose those moments always depends on the piece itself. I try to go for an active moment where the characters are sorting through something, an internal moment for them. That “to be or not to be” moment. Or maybe a seduction moment, “What if we did this?” or “Here is a lesson I want to teach you.” I’m always looking for those kinds of moments in the piece where a dilemma or a decision or a lesson is sorted out and can become a song. In The Gardens of Anuncia, that’s how it works, architecturally. There’s not

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a lot of sung dialogue, if you want to call it that, that I use in some other work.

JCE The frame around the story of Anuncia as a young girl is an older Anuncia tending to her garden on the day she’s due to receive a lifetime achievement award. How did that structure come about?

MJL I decided to write about a lifetime achievement award being given to the character of Anuncia because through the years, Grazie and I have had the chance to present each other with awards at various ceremonies and events like that.

And even though we’re happy and humbled to be honored and we love our work and our community, the awards part of the business is not what we live for. So, having the character not want to go back into the city that evening to get a lifetime achievement award seemed to me an apt way to express that ambivalence. I mean, it’s nice to be recognized, but it’s not why we do what we do.

JOHN LACHIUSA

WE’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR THIRTY YEARS, AND WHEN YOU KNOW SOMEONE THAT LONG, YOU LEARN THEIR STORIES, YOU LEARN THEIR HISTORIES. JCE And in 2021, Graciela was given a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre.

MJL That’s the part that’s so crazy. I had already written the show, with the award storyline, and on the very first day of rehearsal for The Gardens of Anuncia in San Diego in 2021, Graciela got the call that she was getting the Special Tony. We all went bonkers in the rehearsal room!

JCE How did you decide to weave the gardening in as well? Its presence in the show is something I really love, because there’s this image of gardening as a deeply solo act, whereas making theater and dance is so collaborative. But anyone who’s spent time in a garden knows it’s actually a real collaboration.

MJL Yes, absolutely. It’s Graciela’s great passion, and she treats it as a collaboration. She talks with her plants, she talks with the deer, she talks with the chipmunks in her garden—she even names them. She knows the joys and sometimes the heartbreak of working with that collaborator called nature. And she really finds peace in her garden, and magic. I wanted to bring that element to the character of Anuncia, and to weave it together with the ideas of growth and family and gratitude.

JCE What do you most want audiences to take from this show?

MJL I’d like us to remember the people who have shaped us, and how they should be honored and respected. It’s a valentine and a thank-you.

It’s an act of gratitude for those women who created one of the most incredible women in my life. Making The Gardens of Anuncia has been the act of asking myself how I can say “thank you” to those who made me who I am. Every night we should remember to say “Thank you, husband.”

“Thank you, wife.” “Thank you, friend.” “Thank you, teacher.” “Thank you, crossing guard lady.”

You know? It’s those small gestures of thanks that make us all a little more human, and that’s why I wrote this piece. To give gratitude. n

Poster art for Bernarda Alba by James McMullan, 2006. Courtesy of Lincoln Center Theater

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS A CONVERSATION WITH GRACIELA DANIELE

ANNE CATTANEO When did you start

dancing?

IN THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

of what was then titled The New Theater Review, Producing Artistic Director André Bishop remarked that “Graciela Daniele’s rise from the chorus to the captain of the ship is a timehonored American theatrical tradition, but what makes her extraordinary is that she did it entirely on her own idiosyncratic terms.” Throughout Daniele’s career, she has intersected with Fidel Castro, Josephine Baker, Merce Cunningham, and Bob Fosse, with all these encounters forming the constellation of one of the most incredible lives in modern theater. In 1996, in that same tenth anniversary edition of what would become the Review that you now hold in your hands, Daniele sat down with Anne Cattaneo, the legendary dramaturg and previous editor of The Lincoln Center Review, to chat about a life spent dancing and choreographing all over the world. In that interview, reprinted here in its entirety, the influence of Daniele’s early years dancing in Argentina begins a thread that winds all the way through her choreography today.

GRACIELA DANIELE The first dance studio I entered was a little studio in Buenos Aires called Concepción del Valle, where they taught Spanish dancing and ballet. I had a problem with my arch, and the doctor said, “Instead of using shoes to repair the arch, why doesn’t she take ballet?”

I was around six. The studio at the Concepción del Valle was a big room with mirrors on both ends. By looking into one mirror you saw the other mirror and back and forth, like [in] Through the Looking-Glass. The space went on forever because of the mirrors. I had never seen anything like that before.

I wanted to run through that infinite space. It was the beginning of my work. I remember grabbing the barre, which was above my head.

The first thing they teach you is to bend your knees, and whenever I would bend, I lost the barre because of my height. I felt awkward yet also exhilarated. The exhilaration didn’t come as much from the movement as from all the space. I don’t even remember the other kids; I remember feeling totally alone in that space.

The next image I have is of going to an audition for the Teatro Colón School when I was seven years old. It must have been 1947. The Teatro Colón was founded by the Argentinean government and had a great school of ballet. It was one of the greatest opera houses in the world. My mother took me to the audition, and I went up against hundreds of kids. I entered

the rotunda, which was a huge circular room in the Teatro Colón, with one side of mirrors and barres all around. I grabbed the barre, which by this time came to my shoulders.

Alda Mastrazzi, an expert in Cecchetti, was walking around with the artistic director and touching each child’s muscles, body, and feet. It was like they were looking at horses; the only thing they didn’t do was look at your teeth. Everything else was touched. Each child had to extend a foot and point it and show the arch. I extended my foot, and she looked at it. My foot was not well-developed because of the arch problem. I remember trembling, and she started shaking her head and looked up to say no to the artistic director, and by raising her head she looked at me, and she stayed looking at me for several seconds, and then she got up and said, “Take her.” I think she saw something in my eyes. I am not sure what that was. Something passed between us.

She became my teacher for the next seven years.

I didn’t only work at the Teatro Colón School; at night I took other classes. I worked constantly—every day, every night. Mastrazzi was very disciplined, very tough. She had a

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GRACIELA DANIELE

go to the class.” And I just thought it was the greatest. Many people have said to me, “You missed your childhood.” Perhaps the average kind of childhood. But what child wouldn’t want to live in a fairy tale. Did I miss out on childhood? No, I had a terrific childhood.

AC When did you first leave Argentina?

GD I left Argentina with a ballet company that went to Brazil and then to Colombia, where the company dissolved. I was seventeen, and my mother was chaperoning me.

There was an educational channel on television in Colombia, and they asked me if I was interested in choreographing and directing great knowledge of the Cecchetti technique, which is the basic technique in ballet. Cecchetti was an Italian master of ballet who created a technique that gives you enormous strength. Many masters don’t like this technique because it makes you muscular. Cecchetti develops strength, so that a ballerina can jump like a man. I loved it then and still do.

I was chosen out of hundreds of children. We were eighty the first year.

And out of that eighty, five graduated: two women, three men. It wasn’t only the elimination that was brutal. A lot of kids couldn’t take it because it was so much work.

AC Did you have a life other than that?

GD No. It was wonderful to me, the greatest life. I spent all morning in classes at the theater, and then in the afternoon, I went to school, and after school at about five o’clock, I went back to the theater, because part of the school’s curriculum was to use children as extras in performances.

We were the pages who held candles in the operas. One of my favorite roles was in The Magic Flute; I was one of the little cherubs who flew in a box forty feet up. I loved doing that. That was life. I would go to sleep at one o’clock in the morning. My grandmother took me everywhere because my mother worked. At six o’clock in the morning, off went the blanket. “Gracielita, up, let’s go, braids, brush your teeth, and

staying up until three in the morning, glued to the television, listening to this man. I was like everyone else. We all fell in love with him. He was so charming. He would start talking at eleven and go until two in the morning.

I was extremely excited by his ideas and the revolution. He never said he was a communist; he said, “I am not a communist, I am a Cubanist.” It was romantic. He was a hero. But we had an apartment near El Morro, which was the prison, and we were sometimes awakened at six in the morning by shots, and soon we realized he was killing people—so my idea of what was going on changed fast.

AC What happened to your husband?

MANY PEOPLE HAVE SAID TO ME, “YOU MISSED YOUR CHILDHOOD.” PERHAPS THE AVERAGE KIND OF CHILDHOOD. BUT WHAT CHILD WOULDN’T WANT TO LIVE IN A FAIRY TALE.

one program a week on the history of dance. I was a kid, and I didn’t know what l was doing. But it was good pay, and I worked hard. I loved choreographing it, but I never thought of myself as someone who would do this. It was a wonderful exercise—a seed of creativity. And then I got married and went off to Cuba. I was in Cuba in 1959 when Fidel Castro came in. My first husband was the lead singer of Sonora Matancera, which was a big Cuban band.

AC What sort of life did you have? Did you go to nightclubs?

GD Constantly. My husband worked in nightclubs all night. We lived the good life of Batista. But I hated seeing the gambling, the dictatorship, the poor people starving outside. The day Castro came in, I went out in the street and danced with everybody.

From that moment on, I remember

(opposite page, top) Graciela Daniele at thirteen months. (opposite page, bottom); 1947, seven years old; (top) fifteenth birthday in 1955 with her best friends—both dancers at Teatro Colón; (right) Paris, 1960. All images courtesy of Graciela Daniele

GD I left him after eight months. He was a gambler. In the meantime, my mother had married the camera director from the ballet program I did in Colombia. Through me, they fell in

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love and stayed in Colombia. After I left my husband, I went to Colombia for a few weeks, and then I went off to Paris.

AC Why Paris?

GD I had wanted to go to Paris since I was a kid, because in the late fifties the center of ballet was Paris. It had the greatest teachers. I always dreamt of going to Paris to perfect my technique. I had two hundred dollars and a plane ticket.

AC Where did you stay?

GD In Paris, I stayed in a little hotel. I realized after I’d been there for a while that there were always three or four prostitutes outside that hotel. They were very nice. Once they realized I was staying at the hotel, they always said hello. I had the top floor to myself. I had one Argentinean friend who was close by. He helped me a little bit in the beginning. I went to a center for ballet teachers and started taking class with a wonderful Russian woman. You didn’t audition for anything; the choreographers would come to the class. The first week I was there, somebody came to the class, because they had an opening for a soloist at the Opera Ballet of Nice.

They talked to me and asked me if I would be interested in coming to Nice for the season, and I said, “Yes!!!”

I ended up working in Nice for four seasons. I loved it. I lived in a house where Napoleon had lived with a marble staircase.

AC You were doing opera?

GD I was doing ballet. We did repertoire.

It was a magnificent stage. We would do galas, not only there, but sometimes in Monte Carlo and Montpellier. In the summer season, we worked in a place called Arenes de Cimiez, which was an old Greek amphitheater outdoors. What I found extraordinary was we would work all morning, and when the lunch hour came, my Dutch girlfriend Clemi and I would hop on our bicycles, because the theater was on the Mediterranean, put on our swimsuits, and dive into the sea and then go back and rehearse. It was the greatest life. And there were a lot of interesting men around.

AC Did they pick you up on bicycles?

Graciela Daniele, 1981-82, movie of “The Pirates of Penzance.” Courtesy of Graciela Daniele

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

GD No, in Ferraris. Then I went back to Paris and got a studio apartment and worked.

AC How long were you in Paris?

GD Three years. The last summer I was there, an American named George Rich, the choreographer for the Ballet de Olympia, called me and said, “We are going to Milano with Josephine Baker.” It was Josephine Baker and a group of dancers and that was it. She sang, danced, told stories, and we danced in between. We toured with her in Italy and Scandinavia.

AC What kind of dance was it?

GD It was old-fashioned jazz and ballet.

AC Did you do this in nightclubs?

GD No, in big theaters. She didn’t perform in nightclubs.

AC What was Josephine Baker like?

GD We called her “Madame.” She was very nice to us, but she was aloof.

Not aloof in a bad way. She was just separate. She treated her kids well, sent champagne to us, that kind of thing, but she was never someone you could get close to. She was a beautiful star.

AC When did you meet Jerome Robbins?

GD The first time I saw Jerry was when I was on tour with Josephine. I went to see Ballets: USA, which was the first company he ever had. I saw Fancy Free and Interplay, and I went out of my mind. It was a whole evening of Robbins, and I thought it was the most extraordinary thing I had ever seen. I think deep inside I was getting bored with classical ballet. It was becoming too formal and contrived for me. In Paris, a friend said to me, “You’ve got to go see this piece.” So I went to go see the last performance of Robbins’s West Side Story. By then I had signed a contract with the Ballet de Olympia for the last season. I left the theater, sat by the Seine until two o’clock in the morning, and made the decision to go to New York to study. Because I wanted to be able to tell a story through dance the way Robbins did. So I packed everything and said that I was going to visit my family for Christmas, and I never went back. My mother and my stepfather were in Peru at the time.

He was working in Lima, and I went there. I needed to make money, because in Paris you didn’t make much money.

They gave me a television program in Peru. I did a series, a sitcom with dancing. I was the star. I played a Leslie Caron type. Then I came to New York.

AC Where did you live when you first came here?

GD The Ballet Theatre school was on Fifty-Seventh Street, So I lived on FiftySeventh and Ninth Avenue. This was 1963. I went to the Ballet Theatre school for classes. I was in a class with Margot Fonteyn when she was here on her first American tour with Rudolf Nureyev; we studied under Pereyaslavic, who was a remarkable teacher—very Russian, very tough.

AC What type of dancers were in those classes?

GD In order to take those classes, you had to be a fantastic dancer. They

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auditioned you. There weren’t Broadway people there.

AC You were still working in the ballet world?

GD I never stopped. I still am. Ballet is the basis of everything. If you have that, you have a center. You know what your body is about. When I danced in Broadway shows, before the curtain

went up, in “half hour,” I was made-up and onstage doing a full barre.

I went to my ballet class every day, but I came to study modern jazz, and I asked around who the great jazz teacher was. And at that time it was Matt Mattox. He was extraordinary.

He was Jack Cole’s disciple. He knew all the Cole jazz technique. I owe him a lot. I went to a beginners’ class, because I didn’t know anything about jazz. I barely spoke English. I was there the first day and I saw this tall, majestic, wonderful man come in, and

GRACIELA DANIELE

at the end of the class he called me into his office and said, “You are an extraordinary dancer, you are a professional dancer, what are you doing at a beginners’ class?” And I said, “I don’t know anything about jazz.” And he said, “Let me give you a little notebook. You saw all the exercises in the class. Go home and practice those moves and come back to the professional class next week.”

And I started learning with him, and then I decided to go study modern with Martha Graham.

But I never studied with Graham, because again I went to the beginners’ class. Every time I left that school, my entire body was contracted, and I was so depressed and I would go home and cry. And one day, Matt Mattox said, “But darling, Martha Graham is not for you. If you want to learn modern technique, go to Merce Cunningham.”

So I went to Merce, and the first thing he made us do was run through the room, and I said, “I love this, I can deal with this.” There was no depression, no desperation. No headache, no stomachache. It was all about running and jumping.

The beginning was a very lonely time here. I never felt the loneliness in Europe that I felt here. I am not talking about work. I’ve lived in New York for thirty-something years, and I don’t think I’ve ever loved New York.

I think it is a necessary space for me to be in. But I don’t think it goes with my nature. I notice it more when I go back to Europe. Argentina is so European. When I go to Europe I feel very comfortable. Even in England, I feel very much at home. And here, I never did.

But this is the best place in the world to work. Matt Mattox was choreographing What Makes Sammy Run? and there was a leading role of Rita Rio, a South American bombshell.

Matt said, “Would you like to audition?” I said okay. I had no idea what an audition was. I had never auditioned, because in Europe you don’t audition. They come to class and look at you and take you away. He said,

you don’t have to dance, because I know you from class. So I went and talked in my very heavy accent and read and sang in Spanish and I got the role. I was here a month. I arrived in September and by October I was working on Broadway.

AC How did you meet Michael Bennett?

GD Here’s Where I Belong, my second show, was Terrence McNally’s first musical. Bob Waldman did the music and Alfred Uhry did the lyrics. It was directed by Michael Kahn and choreographed by Hanya Holm, who was a master. This woman had done incredible work in the theater and before it got to New York, she was fired. It was the first time many of the others had worked on a musical, and I thought, “It’s weird here. All these people who are doing this for the first time, and they fire the only one who really knows about musicals.”

They replaced Hanya Holm with Tony Mordente. Tony saw me and asked me if I would become his assistant. We came back to New York. We previewed.

We opened. We closed the next day.

However, Tony invited Michael to come and see one of the previews. A week later the phone rang and it was Michael Bennett. I had no idea who he was because I was ignorant about show business here. And I barely spoke English. Michael said, “This is Michael Bennett. I am choreographing a new show and I want you in it. I saw your performance and think you are terrific, and I am offering you a job. You don’t even have to audition.” And I said, “I just got another job on the show Love Match.” He said, “Drop it. This one is

by Neil Simon.” I didn’t know who the hell Neil Simon was. I guess Michael was expecting some big reaction. “And it is produced by David Merrick.” David Merrick I knew, so I went in and met Michael.

AC What was the show?

GD Promises, Promises. Michael and I did several shows together. And we did the Milliken Show. Milliken is a textile company from the south. And every year in the spring, they did two

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LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

I WANTED TO BE ABLE TO TELL A STORY THROUGH DANCE THE WAY ROBBINS DID.

weeks of breakfast shows for all the dealers who came to New York to sell merchandise. It hired the best directors like Michael Bennett and the best dancers from New York and California and stars, including Ginger Rogers, Donald O’Connor, Gloria Swanson, Chita Rivera and Tommy Tune. It was about ten to twelve production numbers. One number would be called “Flannels,” and all the women and men wore flannel clothes, but it was not a fashion parade, it was dance. We did it at the big ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria. A very dear old man named Mr. Kingsley was the director of Milliken, and he became one of my best friends. He loved dancers, respected them. He treated us like kings and queens. It was a great showcase. Towards the end, once all the dealers and buyers had come, they used to do one extra show for the show business people. Producers and directors came to see this. The ballroom was filled with theater people.

I did it as a performer for one year, and then I assisted Michael and performed.

Other choreographers like Peter Gennaro and Alan Johnson came in, and I continued to assist and perform, and then I choreographed the last

four. I think the budget for the last one, in 1980, was two million dollars.

I was practically pushed by Michael to choreograph the Milliken show.

He believed I was a choreographer before I knew or wanted to be one. He encouraged me and talked about me to people. I will always be so thankful to him. Bob Fosse did the same for me.

AC How did you hook up with Bob Fosse?

GD Bob Fosse was at the end of my time on Broadway. I was performing but not constantly, because I was assisting already. By then, I was turned on by the creative side. Bob called me and said, “I would like to see you for Chicago.“ I went to audition, but I didn’t expect to get it, or perhaps I was not that interested. I was happy to audition for him, but I wasn’t that happy about going back to a show on Broadway, but I did. And once that ended, he made me his dance captain.

I admired him tremendously.

AC How did that lead to Tango Apasionado? How did you make the shift from choreographing to directing?

GD After choreographing a few shows on Broadway, something started happening. I was already in my forties. I only started choreographing when I was

thirty-five, and even though I enjoyed works like The Pirates of Penzance, I felt that something was missing. I’d felt the same way when I was a ballet dancer, that only a percentage of myself was being used. And then I met Jim Lewis at INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center.

If Jimmy had not been there, Tango would not have existed. Max Ferrá, the artistic director of INTAR, invited me into the theater and asked me, what do you want to do?” Jimmy was extraordinary because he asked the right questions. He said, “Who would you like to work with?“ Immediately, I said Astor Piazzolla, the greatest living tango composer. He was like a god to me.

In Argentina, there are confiterías, places like salons where women go to have tea in afternoons. My mom and I used to have one day a week where she would take me out to the movies or shopping. She used to love tango. I didn’t because I was in the ballet world. Then one day she took me to a confitería called The Richmond, and we sat and drank tea, and there was Astor—who was a cute boy—playing.

That stayed with me. It sounded totally different from anything I had heard. The love for him continued all my life. And then to have him here, to work with him, was amazing.

Working on Tango was a playground of inventiveness. I miss that freedom, the innocence and ignorance of it all.

No pressure, no expectations. Hey, let’s do this. Hey, what about that? I didn’t think we’d get Astor because Astor was like Mozart as far as I was concerned.

Finally we did get him and he was here, sitting in this room across from me, and all of a sudden I looked up and thought, this is Astor Piazzolla, and he is writing for me. I couldn’t even speak. I was so moved. And Jimmy and I started talking about concepts and ideas, and Astor said, “No, no, no, just tell me how many minutes you need . . . so many seconds, so many bars.” That was the beginning of my adventure as an artist traveling into the unknown. As a director, I could leave behind craft and enter a new country where I could create. n

(Left) Café Richmond at the Retiro FCCA Station, circa 1925.

Courtesy of the Gastón Bourquin Documentary Collection, Buenos Aires Museum

AMANDA PARRISH MORGAN

IN HER PROFILE of Camille T. Dungy in the May/June 2023 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, Renée H. Shea observes that “Any reference to ‘garden’ tempts a leap to archetype, allegory, metaphor, and all manner of interpretation.” But in Soil, Dungy’s 2023 memoir, the poet is concerned with her very own “real garden—the pleasures of the garden she grows as the site of beauty.”

While a garden, of course, can be a display of artistic expression, it can also be a source of food, medicine, or even poison—a place both metaphorically and literally of agency, responsibility, healing, cultivation, generation, and power rendered less threatening by virtue of its beauty. The garden has long been a place in which women have had access to creative, aesthetic, and even scientific power denied to them in other realms. From those in Dungy’s poetry and Alice Walker’s classic In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens to that of the protagonist of Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, literary gardens often draw upon the garden’s mix of aesthetic, nurturing, and even subversive power. Historically, while many sciences were closed to women, botany, horticulture, and medicinal gardening were rendered less threatening by their proximity to those seemingly innocuous decorative gardens that evoke a particular set of archetype, allegory, and metaphor.

The idea that a garden might provide something like maternal protection dates back centuries. In an era before modern medicine, women— often branded witches as a result drew on knowledge of plants to prevent and treat ailments. In Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, a fictional telling of William Shakespeare’s family’s reeling in the loss of their son to the plague, Shakespeare’s wife is a trusted medicine woman in Stratford-upon-Avon, known for handing tinctures and salves out the window of their home and for her skill with plant remedies.

In O’Farrell’s novel, Eliza Shakespeare was born to a woman with both deep spiritual intuition and extensive pragmatic knowledge of the

natural world, and herself inherited many of those gifts, including a sort of clairvoyance that, while she cannot be quite sure what it means, informs her that she will outlive one of her children. After Hamnet’s death, they move to a new home and leave behind the land and the plants that grew alongside what they’ve now lost.

At the new house Shakespeare (though he’s never mentioned by name) builds, Eliza sets to planting a new garden. She will never heal from the loss of her son and what her husband’s response to his death has done to their marriage, but she finds a way to tend to her family with her garden: She plants a row of apple trees along the high brick wall. Two pairs of pear trees on either side of the main path, plums, elder, birch, gooseberry bushes, blushstemmed rhubarb. She takes a cutting from a dog rose growing by the river and cultivates it against the warm wall of the malthouse. She puts in a rowan sapling near the back door. She fills the soil with chamomile and marigold, with hyssop and sage, borage and angelica, with wormwort and feverfew.

It is then, finally that there is a faint possibility of hope: “She installs seven skeps at the furthest edge of the garden; on warm July days it is possible to hear the rumble of bees from the house.”

In Shakespeare’s time, families often planted a rowan tree at the edge of their property or the door to their home. The tree’s berries can be made into a tart jam, and have a history of treating stomach troubles. The bark has been used to treat eye infections, rheumatism, asthma, and colds, though it is for the spiritual protection and the connection it provides to her mother that Eliza plants the tree in Hamnet. She is putting down roots, tending to her garden, protecting her family, however defined by grief her life may always be.

(left) Cecilia Vicuña,“Bendígame Mamita” (1977), oil on canvas. Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London

CECILIA VICUÑA (b. 1948, Santiago) is a Chilean poet, visual artist, and activist known for her innovative approach to art and deep engagement with indigenous cultures and ecological concerns. With work that spans across poetry and installations, she explores themes of memory, language, science, and spirituality. Vicuña painted Bendígame Mamita (“Bless Me, Mommy”) in 1977, and for most of its existence, the painting hung in her mother Norma Ramírez’s house. In 2022, Vicuña’s dreamlike depiction of her mother was selected to be a part of the fifty-ninth Venice Biennale, and visitors to Venice were greeted by Ramírez’s eyes on buses and posters all around the city.

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Underlying our collective temptation toward archetype are the ways in which gardens have so often been evoked as an allegory for motherhood—the easy parallels of germination and fertility and growth. But another more complex way to think about the garden’s connection to motherhood lies in their shared hope for the future and a stubborn, if sometimes illogical, conviction that nurturing, cultivation, and commitment to beauty might leave some kind of legacy in a small garden plot or an individual family.

When I think of my grandparents’ backyard, I think of the metal swing set by the fence, the cement birdbath whose pedestal was a statue of a little girl I named Emily, my grandfather Pa’s tomatoes, and my grandmother Baba’s flowers.

Baba’s garden existed in a kind of childhood dreamscape for me, and although I remember its magic and its beauty, I remember little about its particulars. “Mostly she grew from seed because it was so much less expensive than the actual plants were,” my mom told me. “She grew marigolds and petunias and four o’clocks.”

Some of Baba’s plants were at odds with her otherwise practical and frugal garden. But she grew tea roses, so susceptible to insects and fungal disease that to nurture them was to be willing to invest both time and money, because she loved them.

Baba was a storyteller, a musician, a knitter, and a sewer. Her garden, like the stories she told and the clothes she made and the music she played, was a way to create a world for the people she loved. In what I imagine to be a kind of inheritance from my grandmother, whose stories, as a result of time and place and circumstance, were unpublished, my mom and I are both writers. It’s easy to see the power in growing food to sustain a family through lean times or herbs that might serve as antidotes to illness, and for that reason, I’d long considered the power of gardens was in spite of their beauty.

For a long time, although I admired the flowers and vegetables

AMANDA PARRISH MORGAN

that both my mother and grandmother grew, the notion of devoting myself to something as unapologetically domestic as gardening felt like too raw an admission of maternal desire, and so even though I’d once known how to knit and had sewed myself a navy blue skater dress patterned with tiedyed suns and moons to wear on the first day of fifth grade, had tended a little garden in the yard of my childhood home, as a young adult I set about forgetting how to do this kind of work, how to perform this kind of care. It had seemed too feminine, too sincere, too unambitious. Better, for some reason I could not quite articulate, to harbor weeds reaching past my shoulders as I spent endless hours at my desk, working until it was too dark to see anything outside.

YEARS LATER, when I suddenly

found myself at home with two young children and faced with growing dread about supermarket shelves so often bare of produce in the early months of the pandemic, I ordered a kit of seeds and wooden labels to fit inside a box made into a miniature greenhouse so that I could start zucchini, kale, carrot, and tomato seeds inside. After waiting for the threat of frost to pass, as directed by the back of the seed packet, I transplanted the sprouted together. Between overseeing online kindergarten and disinfecting the groceries we found on the store shelves, I wrote very little in those months. Finally, in spite of my ineptitude, my little family ate salads from our garden that summer.

WHEN MY CHILDREN were babies and I half seriously suggested sheltering them from any of the heartbreaking children’s stories I remembered well from my own

childhood, my mom told me that it was my job to teach them to live in the world without me. I was startled because it was so obviously true and something I’d been able to consider only in the most literal terms. Sure, teaching them to brush their teeth or tie their shoes or even one day drive a car was part of raising independent adults, but that it was my job, too, to allow them to engage with the emotional devastation of Where the Red Fern Grows came as a surprise.

Knowing stories of beauty and healing amidst moments of loss and sorrow is something I’ll need too—sometime a millions years from now—to live without my mom, and she’s given them to me.

In The Gardens of Anuncia, the garden’s most powerful instances of healing and cultivation and revolution come from the way in which it’s taught Anuncia to live—and to create art—in a world without her mother andher grandmother. Through the magic of the garden, young Anuncia can stand side by side not only with her younger self, but with her mother, aunt, and grandmother. The garden is both a source of power and a place of beauty—a kingdom in which artistic expression and cultivation is essential to the connections we nurture with both the future and the past. In this way, the garden’s beauty is passed down from mother to child as its own source of strength, power, and healing. For Mamí and Granmama, part of teaching Anuncia to live in the world without them means teach-ing her to cultivate her own garden—both real and allegorical— and for Anuncia, the legacy she’ll leave behind is not just her art, but her garden and the roots, in the form of connection to the women who raised what the garden holds. n AMANDA PARRISH MORGAN is the author of Stroller (Bloomsbury), which The New Yorker named one of its Best Books of 2022. She teaches at Fairfield University, the University of Chicago’s Graham School, and the Westport Writers’ Workshop. Morgan lives in Connecticut with her husband and two children.

Vegetable illustrations © panaceaart / Adobe Stock

THE MUSEO EVITA OPENED IN 2002, part of Argentina’s commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Eva Perón’s death from cervical cancer July 26, 1952.

A favorite Perón anecdote comes from the museum’s founding curator, Gabriel Miremont.

Miremont was often alone, ironing gowns after decades in storage. A faint scent would engulf him, as if the spirit of Evita were embracing him. He nearly thought he was crazy, until Eva’s sister brought him her last bottle of perfume. Mystery solved. The perfume, not Eva, was haunting him. Or was she?

The presence of Juan and Eva Perón, Latin America’s most prominent power couple, remains deeply felt in Argentina nearly eighty years after legend says they met on a fateful 1944 night at a Luna Park charity performance. During dark, oppressive periods, even images of them might have been impossible to find; possessing them was a reason for arrest under dictatorships that followed.

Now, under current Peronist President Alberto Fernández, the country is as redolent of the era once again as the air around Evita’s dresses.

An audience who might only know the period through the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and 1996 movie Evita could wonder about the couple’s hold on the Argentine psyche.

Certainly, as Americans, we have important presidential couples: George and Martha Washington, FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as well as Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, who was a first lady who later had her own presidential bid. Donald Trump and his glamorous wife, Melania, with their eponymous tower just blocks from Lincoln Center, have an aura similar to the Peróns, made even more apparent by the fact that Donald is old enough to be Melania’s father. Perón was forty-eight when he met the twenty-four yearold actress Eva Duarte, which meant they shared same age difference as our former First Couple.

Some understanding of this period comes from Santiago Regolo of the research team at the Museo Evita. Regolo is part of the Eva Perón Historical Research Foundation, overseen by Cristina Álvarez Rodríguez, Evita’s grandniece and current minister of government and infrastructure of Buenos Aires Province.

Regolo explained that Peronism and the First Couple offered a chance for “the humble, the women, and the workers, the real possibility of access to rights, resources, public and political spaces that had historically been denied to them.”

Moreover, according to Regolo, it meant that

NOSTALGIA FOR THE PERÓNS?

MICHAEL T. LUONGO

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the working class, a previously excluded section of the population, could “think of itself as part of a country that had not considered them for a long time.”

Though commonly called Peronism, the official name is Partido Justicialista, translated as the Justicialist Party or Social Justice Party. According to Regolo, “Peronism continues to function today as an archetype, as an idea, as a myth. And perhaps also as nostalgia for a world that knew how to be and that still remains as a living memory among Argentines.”

Rights for workers and others expanded during this period, including the passing of women’s suffrage in 1947. Such opportunity, Regolo added, “made it possible to rethink popular culture in our country and generate an imagery—which still persists today—in which Peronism appears as a path to the acquisition of rights and the possibility of expanded participation in social life.”

Academics studying Argentina have highlighted these transformations. Dr. Vicky Murillo, director of Columbia University’s Institute of Latin American Studies and an Argentine herself, likened Peronism to our Great Depression and its New Deal. Dr. Murillo says nostalgic memories “make sense because it was a period of high redistribution [when] the working class and the middle class improved their position dramatically.”

This period is also detailed in the 1996 biography Evita: The Real Life of Eva Perón, by Nicholas Fraser and Dr. Marysa Navarro-Aranguren.

Dr. Navarro-Aranguren, a professor emerita of Dartmouth College, said the period is marked by “improving education and improving housing for people who live in poor areas. All of this makes it possible for people who never have vacations to go on vacations.” She added a litany of changes occurred from complex new policies to the construction of hospitals, schools, and expanded public services throughout the entire country.

Indeed, the Peróns transformed not only the capital and its surroundings, where today about a third of Argentina’s nearly forty-six million people live, but the entire country. This included Mar del Plata, previously an elite beach resort. Under the Peróns, union hotels thrived; even today their lobbies are adorned with busts of the couple. One enormous waterfront vacation complex is in nearby Colonia Chapadmalal, built on land requisitioned from a wealthy property owner. Such structures are examples of why the poor loved the Peróns and the wealthy despised them.

Despite this dichotomy, the nostalgia is a reaction against what came after this period.

Argentine native Valeria Solomonoff of Rosario,

MICHAEL T. LUONGO

the hometown of soccer great Lionel Messi, said in that period “The country was flourishing.

The economy was strong. We benefited from the end of the war.” Solomonoff, a New York–based tango choreographer, was involved in the San Diego production of The Gardens of Anuncia and a 2019 limited-run revival of Evita at the New York City Center in Manhattan.

These economic benefits could not be sustained indefinitely. It is hard to believe looking at the country today, but 1940s Argentina, despite inequality, was second in wealth only to the United States. There was a rivalry over economic domination of Europe akin to today’s trade wars with China. Alarmed by Evita’s 1947 Rainbow Tour, American officials added restrictions to the Marshall Plan, blocking European trade with Argentina and stymieing Perón’s economic plans.

Yet this was not the worst to come. Beginning in 1955, a string of dictatorships would terrorize the country. Perón made a brief, chaotic return in the 1970s, and his third wife, Isabel, became Argentina’s first female president upon his death in 1974; she remained in power until a 1976 coup exiled her. Democracy permanently returned after Argentina’s 1982 Falkland Islands War loss.

The horrors of this epoch, known as the National Reorganization Process and the Dirty War, are portrayed in Argentina, 1985, the Oscar-nominated Argentine film about the trial of these dictators who murdered thirty thousand Desaparecidos, or Disappeared.

Can a democracy become fascist? The evidence suggests it’s a question Americans should ponder too. Despite keen awareness of media’s power— Evita was an actress, after all—the Peróns were against a free press. The newspaper office destruction portrayed in Evita is based on what happened to La Prensa, the favored publication of the wealthy. Time, The New York Times and other American publications were banned for periods of time after reporting news the First Couple did not like. A 1977 Boston Review article points to Borges’ objections to Perón’s fascist tendencies and support of the Nazis.

Perón was an Argentine military attaché in Germany and Italy under Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, respectively. Sympathetic to their regimes, he later offered a safe haven to escaping Nazis. Argentine journalist Uki Goñi details this in his 2002 book The Real Odessa: How Nazi War Criminals Escaped Europe. The book was republished in 2022, with Goñi explaining in the new edition how Argentina’s tumultuous history forces its citizens to live with cognitive dissonance and secrets with “none as deafening as that Argentine President Juan Perón and his wife, Evita, at a boxing match in Buenos Aires © Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo

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surrounding Perón, the Catholic Church and the Nazis they helped to escape from justice.”

During my own time living in Argentina, locals who grew up near the German embassy told me of mysterious cars in the darkest hours. As described in my own guidebook, Frommer’s Buenos Aires, restaurants like Café ABC were Nazi haunts. Art even reflects this Peronist duality: Argentine actress Elena Roger performed as Evita in London and the 2012 Broadway revival, and then played a Nazi hunter trailing Josef Mengele in the 2013 Argentine film The German Doctor.

Decades later, despite such baggage, how did the party once again become Argentina’s most important political force? Like the country, Peronism transformed itself.

One expert on these changes is Harvard University’s Dr. Steven Levitsky, author of the 2003 book Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. In a 1998 issue of the academic journal Party Politics, Dr. Levitsky wrote about the party’s adaptability, particularly in 1989, when Peronist President Carlos Menem “successfully implemented a neoliberal program that clashed with both party tradition and the interests of the party’s trade union allies. At the same time, the Peronist government retained the support of both the party and its working-and lower-class base, allowing it to win four straight national elections.”

The contradiction was not unlike neoliberal changes in the United States under President Bill Clinton. Dr. Levitsky points out in the Party Politics article that turmoil allows for paradoxes, where “party institutionalization may facilitate the kinds of innovative responses that can be critical to organizational survival and, in some cases, economic and political stability.”

Further changes would come after 2001’s Argentine peso crisis. Another Peronist power couple, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, began alternating between the roles of elected president and first spouse, though Néstor died in 2010. Regolo compares this couple to Juan and Evita, describing them as “two leaders who complement each other in the political leadership of a government, a movement, a party. We are not talking about a president and a first lady. We are talking about a couple in which both parties complement each other and display forms of political action that make it possible to relate to the various social, economic, political, union, and other types of civil organizations in a particular way.”

Is Argentina a place Americans can understand? Regolo says “Americans have a hard time understanding the historical particularities

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

of Argentina because many times they tend to explain them based on processes or experiences that are not similar or comparable to ours.” He added, “to understand Peronism, represented especially in the figures of Perón and Evita, means the emergence of another way of thinking about the organization of a country and an alternative project from the one that had governed Argentina until that moment.”

Solomonoff concurred, stating “in America, there is such a tendency to be so quick, and [to judge] everything [as] democratic or antidemocratic. I’m seeing it as so much more gray.”

Beyond reading, visiting Argentina might help someone more deeply understand the complexities of the Peronist legacy. That’s what Broadway actor Michael Cerveris did to prepare for his 2012 role as Juan Perón. During this time, he visited the Instituto Nacional Juan Domingo Perón to meet people who personally knew the Peróns. Cerveris said, “Americans like to view things in terms of single narratives: sort of simple, good and bad, popular, unpopular, right or wrong. The sense that I got was it’s far more complicated.”

What struck Cerveris most was the living history.

Cristina Kirchner, who often compares herself to Evita, was now president. A new Evita monument was inaugurated on Avenida 9 de Julio, the world’s widest boulevard, attached to the façade of the Perón-era Ministry of Health building. It was the site where Evita had planned to announce her 1951 vice presidential bid, withdrawing from consideration in an emotional event seen by two million people lining the streets. Cerveris remarked, “it didn’t feel like history, which was one of the more surprising things. It felt very current, like people have feelings about them almost as though they are still alive and exerting an influence on the country.”

This too is like The Gardens of Anuncia— she might hate the Peróns, but for Anuncia, the past is ever present. Stories of the Peróns blend into memories onstage, continuing to envelope and haunt her, bringing all of us back in time. n MICHAEL LUONGO is an award-winning travel writer who lived in Argentina for several years and is the author of books including Frommer’s Buenos Aires and the novel The Voyeur, with bylines in the New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg News, Gay City News and others. He is currently a PhD student at Purdue University, researching tourism redevelopment in the context of conflict. He lives in both Indiana and Manhattan.

Opposite page: (Top) Sueño Nro 11, Niño Flor, 1949, and (bottom) Sueño Nro 43, 1948, silver gelatin prints, by Grete Stern © The Estate of Grete Stern, Courtesy of Galería Jorge Mara–La Ruche

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GRETE STERN (b. 1904, Germany, d. 1999, Argentina) was a queer, Jewish photographer and graphic designer best known for her groundbreaking Sueños ("Dreams") series, created in the 1940s, where she manipulated photographs to illustrate dreams. Her work played an essential role in the modernization of Argentinean photography, and today her photomontages are known for having had a fundamental influence on the dissemination of psychoanalysis in Argentina.

CECILY PARKS

Girlhood CECILY PARKS

Girlhood was when I slept in the woods bareheaded beneath jagged stars and the membranous near-misses of bats, when I tasted watercress, wild carrot, and sorrel, when I was known by the lilac I hid beside, and when that lilac, burdened by my expectations of lilacs, began a journey without me, as when the dirt road sang, O, rugosa rose, farewell, and ran behind the clipped white pine hedge into the immeasurable heartbreaks of the field.

This poem originally appeared in The New Yorker.

CECILY PARKS̕s third book of poems, The Seeds, is forthcoming from Alice James Books. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The New Republic, Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University and lives in Austin.

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