Tornado

Sol Hurok, the Barnum of ballet, who has marketed every fashion in footwork from classic Pavlova to the Hindu Shan-Kar, put them all together last week in one 90-lb. package. His newest discovery, tiny, sinewy Carmelita Maracci, 34, got rave notices at her Carnegie Hall debut. She swirled in flamencos, glided through a waltz, and in the purple breeches of a matador climaxed a gymnastic bullfight on pointes as delicately as a Russian ballerina. Glowed Hurok: "It would have been easier to put Pavlova, Isadora Duncan and Escudero on the same stage and melt them down into one. But can you imagine what the tickets would have cost?"

Carmelita Maracci is an ebony-haired, hollow-cheeked Hollywood dance teacher, born in Montevideo to a Spanish pianist mother and an Italian rancher. In California, where she was brought at two, she studied under a ballet master and a scarf dancer. Before the war, she had several off-Broadway recitals which attracted critical enthusiasm but few crowds, and on one trip netted just enough for a train ticket back to California, where she has taught bumps to strip teasers and kicks to Choreographers Jerome Robbins and Agnes de Mille.

Hurok hired her and her troupe of five, sight unseen, to fill out some of Argentinita's bookings after Argentinita died TIME, Oct. 8). He had been impressed by Maracci's notices, in which critics began bravely by referring to her as a "tornado" and then faltered when they tried to classify what she was up to. (Says she: "Why should you describe it in words? I can't listen to music and just get up and do wallpaper designs.") She is scornful of the formal ballet: "I can do 17 pirouettes in a row too, but it's as though Artur Schnabel stopped in the middle of a movement and said: 'This trill is good but I can do it longer.' "

In her programs Maracci sandwiches jotas (Spanish peasant dances) and old-fashioned ballets with such pure Maracci as Viva Tu Madre (Long Live Your Mother), in which she fans herself feverishly during a five-minute whirl on a piano stool ("There are times when people have to remain riveted in one place"), and Portrait in the Raw Espana, in which, as a woman of leisure, she is carried about by two handmaidens who prop her up, move her legs puppet-like when she walks, and even click her castanets for her.

Dances like these, she confesses, often confuse audiences in such stop-offs as Lubbock, Tex., Grand Junction, Colo., and Stillwater, Okla. Says she: "They want to know, where is 'The Swan'? They like it, but 'it wasn't purty enough.' They are disturbed. It's unfair for someone to go tootling back and forth across the country dancing nothing but what their butcher thinks is a pretty calendar."

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