María Benítez, dancer who championed flamenco, is dead at 82

The New York Times in 1984 called Benítez, whose father was from Puerto Rico and mother was of Native American descent, “the leading American-based Spanish dancer,” noting that she had proved “you don’t have to be Spanish to perform Spanish dance.”

By Brian Seibert

María Benítez, an American dancer and choreographer who, as the founder of a popular Spanish dance troupe, played a major role in making New Mexico a hotbed for flamenco, died Tuesday at her home in Santa Fe. She was 82.

Her death was confirmed by her son, Francisco Benítez, who is her only immediate survivor and who did not specify a cause.

Benítez was born in Minnesota, but she spent most of her childhood in Taos, New Mexico, where she began taking ballet classes at 10. At 18, she moved to Spain to study Spanish dance. There, in 1965, she met Cecilio Benítez, who was in charge of scenography and lighting at the Fontalba Theater in Madrid. They soon married, and she brought him back to her homeland, settling in New Mexico, where she started teaching and performing Spanish dance at El Nido, a bar in Santa Fe.

The Benítezes formed a dance troupe, at first called the María Benítez Spanish Company and then later named the María Benítez Teatro Flamenco. In 1976, they moved to New York City and began splitting their time between that city and Santa Fe. The company became the troupe in residence at the Lodge at Santa Fe and performed every summer in a cabaret theater that was modeled on the flamenco tablaos of Spain and was eventually named after her.

“She helped make New Mexico a capital of flamenco, not just in the United States but on the global scale,” Nicolasa Chávez, the deputy state historian of New Mexico and author of “The Spirit of Flamenco: From Spain to New Mexico” (2015), said in an interview. “People came from everywhere to see her shows” — including, Chávez recalled, ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov.

“It took years to build an audience,” Benítez told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 2015.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Eva Enciñias-Sandoval was building a parallel flamenco scene in Albuquerque: She established a flamenco festival, a flamenco institute and flamenco concentration at the University of New Mexico, the only such concentration in the country. Between the contributions of Enciñias-Sandoval and Benítez, New Mexico became known among aficionados as the flamenco state.

The Benítez company attracted top younger talent from Spain and worked with eminences like Spanish dancer and choreographer Mario Maya and Italian-born American star José Greco. It toured nationally, appearing in prestigious series like the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts and the American Dance Festival in Connecticut. In the 1980s, it performed nearly annually at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan; in the 1990s, those appearances dropped in frequency to every other year.

When the troupe appeared at the Joyce in 1984, Anna Kisselgoff, then chief dance critic of The New York Times, called Benítez “the leading American-based Spanish dancer,” noting that she had proved “you don’t have to be Spanish to perform Spanish dance.” Benítez, she wrote, “gives us the best of the ineffable quality that defines flamenco as a genre.”

Later reviews tended to note Benítez’s efforts to present flamenco in new ways, and in what another Times dance critic, Jennifer Dunning, in 1989 called a cooler style “that emphasizes the refinement of the art over its passionate earthiness.” Six years later, praising Benítez’s pliant and articulated torso and her long line and lyric articulation of hands and fingers, Dunning called her “the most feminine of flamenco dancers.”

Benítez’s “great gift,” Tobi Tobias wrote in New York magazine in 1984, “is to inhabit her dances so fully that, in her long solo passages, she seems to go on a journey to another place, taking the susceptible viewer with her.”

“This is a quality great dancers share,” Tobias continued, comparing her to greats in American modern dance and Russian ballet. “Benítez performing flamenco is akin to Martha Graham in ‘Clytemnestra’ and Ulanova as the dying swan.”

María Woesha Díaz was born in Cass Lake, Minnesota, on April 14, 1942. Her father, Josue Díaz, was a Puerto Rican-born federal employee. Her mother, Geraldine (Decoteau) Benítez, was a teacher of Chippewa and Oneida descent who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in various places before the family settled in Taos, New Mexico.

In 1974, Benítez and her husband founded the Institute for Spanish Arts, an educational nonprofit, in Santa Fe. A youth company, Flamenco’s Next Generation, performed at schools and fiestas throughout New Mexico.

“Her approach to dance was not just teaching the steps,” Chávez said. “She taught the culture and the history, giving generations of students a real understanding of what Spanish dance and flamenco are. A lot of dancers who got their start with María have their own companies today.”

In the late 1980s and the ’90s, Benítez performed in and choreographed several productions at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, including two productions of “Carmen.” The second, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, was broadcast as part of the PBS series “Great Performances.” She also worked for the Dallas Opera and the Santa Fe Opera, and she later served on the Santa Fe company’s board.

After Benítez retired from performing in 2006, a series of her proteges took over in the Benítez theater: first Juan Siddi, then Antonio Granjero and Estefanía Ramírez, then Emmy Grimm, known professionally as La Emi.

Cecilio Benítez died in 2014 at 80.

“You want to transmit a power of what you are saying from the heart,” Benítez told New Mexico PBS in 2013. “And it has to come from the heart.”