Maria BenitezAn American dancer and choreographer who, as the founder of a popular Spanish dance troupe, played a key role in making New Mexico a center for flamenco, died Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe. She was 82 years old.
Her death was confirmed by her son, Francisco Benitez, who is her only immediate survivor and who has not specified a cause.
Ms. Benitez was born in Minnesota, but spent most of her childhood in Taos, N.M., where she began taking ballet classes at age 10. At 18, she went to Spain to study Spanish dance. There, in 1965, she met Cecilio Benitez, who was in charge of scenery and lighting at the Fontalba Theater in Madrid. They soon married, and she took him back to her homeland, settling in New Mexico, where he began teaching and performing Spanish dance at Santa Fe’s Bar El Nido.
Benitez formed a dance troupe, first called and later renamed the Maria Benitez Spanish Company. Maria Benitez Flamenco Theater. In 1976, he moved to New York and began dividing his time between that city and Santa Fe. The company became a troupe in residence at the Lodge at Santa Fe and performed every summer in a cabaret theater that was based on Spanish flamenco tableaux and eventually named after him.
“She helped make New Mexico the capital of flamenco not only in the United States but globally,” said Nicolas Chavez, New Mexico’s deputy state historian and author of “The Spirit of Flamenco: From Spain to New.” Mexico” (2015), said in an interview. “People came from all over to see her shows” — including, Ms. Chavez recalled, ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov.
“It took years to build an audience,” Ms. Benitez told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 2015.
In the 1970s and 80s, Eva Encinias-Sandoval was building a parallel flamenco scene in Albuquerque: she founded a flamenco festival, a flamenco institute, and a flamenco concentration at the University of New Mexico, the only such concentration in the country. Ms. Enciñias-Sandoval and Ms. Between Benitez’s contributions, New Mexico became known among aficionados as the State of Flamenco.
The Benitez company attracted Spain’s top young talent and worked with talented people such as Spanish dancers and choreographers. Mario Maya and Italian-born American star Jose Greco. He tours nationally, appearing in prestigious series such as the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts and the American Dance Festival in Connecticut. In the 1980s, it performed almost annually at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan; In the 1990s, those appearances decreased in frequency to every other year.
When the troupe appeared at Joyce in 1984, Anna Kisselgoff, chief dance critic for The New York Times, Ms. Benitez has been called a “leading American-based Spanish dancer.” noted that she proved that “you don’t have to be Spanish to dance Spanish.” Ms. Benítez, she wrote, “gives us the quality that defines flamenco as a genre.”
Later reviews tended to note Ms. Benítez’s attempts to present flamenco in a new way, and in 1989 another Times dance critic, Jennifer Dunning, did. Called cool style “Which emphasizes its passionate ground over the refinement of art.” Six years later, Ms. Dunning called her “the most feminine of flamenco dancers,” admiring Ms. Benitez’s lithe and articulated torso and her long line and lyrical articulation of arms and fingers.
Ms. Benitez’s “great gift,” Toby Tobias wrote in New York magazine in 1984, “is that her dances are so fully inhabited that, in her long solo passages, she seems to take the sensitive audience on a journey to another place. Hers.”
“This is a quality great dancer shares,” Ms. Tobias continued, comparing her to the greats of American modern dance and Russian ballet. “Benitez Flamenco Performs Like Martha Graham in ‘Clytemnestra’ and Ulanova as the Dying Swan.”
Maria Voesha Diaz was born on April 14, 1942 in Cass Lake, Minn. Her father, Josue Diaz, was a Puerto Rican-born federal employee. Her mother, Geraldine (Decoteau) Benitez, was a teacher of Chippewa and Oneida descent who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in various locations before the family settled in Taos, NM.
In 1974, Mrs. Benitez and her husband founded the Spanish Arts Institute, an educational nonprofit organization in Santa Fe. A youth company, Next Generation of Flamenco, performs at schools and festivals throughout New Mexico.
“His approach to dance was not just teaching the steps,” Ms. Chavez said. “She taught culture and history, giving generations of students a real understanding of what Spanish dance and flamenco is all about. Many of the dancers who started with Maria now have their own companies.”
In the late 1980s and 90s, Ms. Benitez performed 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 later served on the board of the Santa Fe Company.
After Ms. Benitez retired from performing in 2006, a series of her protégés took over the Benitez Theater: first Juan Siddi, then Antonio Grangero and Estefania Ramirez, then Amy Grimm, known professionally as La Aimee.
Mr. Benitez died in 2014 At 80.
“You want to transmit the power of what you say from the heart,” Ms. Benitez told New Mexico PBS in 2013. “And it has to come from the heart.”
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