This story begins with a premonitory debut: the actresses Irene Doher and Paloma García-Consuegra (better known as Reme and Berta from Livianas Provincianas), performed for the first time in front of the public as cupletistas in El Umbral de Primavera back in 2016, playing two modistillas who lived in a modest room-workshop on Tribulete Street.
Curiously, this “diverse cultural nursery” is located at 11 Primavera Street (Lavapiés). It is very close to a ramshackle garage that, at the end of the 19th century, housed the Barbieri theater. It was there where the chroniclers of the city place the origin of the cuplé in Spain, the stage where La Pulga was interpreted for the first time in our country.
This divine sign of Madrid’s geography will not be the only one that connects the cupletistas of the XXI century with their predecessors of the late XIX century. Currently, from October 10 until November 28, we will find them in Teatros Luchana with their show Mírame, an ode to the vedettes and divas of our geography.
In their third show, Livianas Provincianas have finally tasted the syrups of success: they arrive at Teatros Luchana after a “world, global, sidereal tour” and after having earned a lot of money, made the cover of Interviú, filled their closet with flamboyant dresses, feathers, sequins, jewels and have their own fan club. But is all that glitters gold? In Mírame ( name taken from the famous song by Celia Gámez) Livianas Provincianas return to the cuplé and the popular song paying tribute to the divas of the “destape”, the vedettes and the ups and downs of fame.
How was the Madrid of the cuplé?
La Reme and Berta have turned the stage of Teatros Luchana into a sort of café cantante, like those that populated Madrid two centuries ago. Those in which the primitive sicalípticas wiggled their bodies and performed, gaining followers and detractors (Unamuno, for example, would write two reports on that Madrid invaded by abject numbers, as if it were a plague).
Nothing could have been further from the truth: those underworlds of supposedly musty theaters and dense atmosphere were places of creation, openness, art and freedom. Of women (La Fornarina, la Chelito, la Goya…) and transformers (like the Cartagena-born Edmond de Bries), who triumphed on stage, who earned unimaginable salaries for the time and an extraordinary independence for women. And this is what caught Irene and Paloma’s attention and made them create a theatrical company of contemporary cupletistas.
“We met at the Carlos III University and there we discovered the repertoire of cuplés, with a cabaret we did with Jesús Barranco. We were fascinated to reencounter a past that we didn’t know was there and that appealed to us much more than the sepia, moody one we had studied. It was like feeling that you don’t belong to your family and, suddenly, finding a lost uncle and saying: ah, this is where I come from, he’s just like me,” says Irene Doher.
“The feminist vision of our performances as Livianas Provincianas could not be otherwise. We haven’t approached it as ‘let’s do it this way’, but ‘let’s do it the way we are’. And we are contemporary, feminist people,” García-Consuegra explains.
In addition, the cuplés have always had “a lot of feminist and class vindication”, in Doher’s words, with lyrics that clearly talked about female masturbation and about becoming the queens of the scene: about making decisions for themselves.
Thus some of them became banned songs, such as ‘La Sindicalista’ sung by Carmen Flores: “Women should be as I think, neither single, nor widowed, nor married. Equality, fraternity, legality. Sharing of goods. And nothing has happened here”. The Madrid of the cuplés was the Madrid of vindication.
Paloma (la Reme), says of that Madrid that it was “a place of opportunities, very rooted in what it is today as well; a place where nobody is from here. Women from the provinces, like us Livianas Provincianas, came to look for opportunities“.
“If Reme and Berta lived in the 19th century we would surely be modistillas, of course. We have taken the biography of the Livianas Provincianas from the lyrics of the cuplés (which are full of dressmakers, because it was one of the few trades to which women could aspire). They earned two dollars and dreamed of earning what the great divas of the Apolo (who spent it on blond hair, driving a convertible around Madrid or being businesswomen…),” says Irene Doher (Berta from Livianas Provincianas).
The concert cafés that no longer exist
Ironically, this sung freedom took place only within four walls and in the shelter of the night. The cuplé boom, which began as a “lubricious” practice at the end of the 19th century, frowned upon by the ladies and gentlemen, became mass culture in the 1920s, with more mainstream lyrics, more “comfortable” for all audiences. And so they reached the big theaters and bourgeois spaces.
We highlight some salons, music halls, concert cafes (few survive, many disappeared) that trace a map through the past of a Madrid in which fleas were sought and figs were rubbed. All of them (and many more) collected in that bible written by Gloria G. Durán which is Sicalípticas: el gran libro del cuplé y la sicalipsis (editorial La Felguera). A Madrid that Durán defines as “of the badly sewn sequin and the sloping streets, the Madrid of the chistera and the beret, of the pipe and the rolling tobacco”.
Apolo Theater
Referred to in this book as “the cathedral of the género chico”, it was the place where Fornarina worked tirelessly until her death at the age of 31 in the Rosario sanatorium in Madrid. Today, we can still visit her tomb and pay tribute to her in the San Isidro cemetery.
Circo Price Theater
This is where the Cachavera made her debut, in the company of an already consolidated Fornarina. The Circo Price was located in what used to be the Plaza del Rey and, as Gloria G. Durán points out in the book, “it was an ideal place for sycophancy and that menacing endless stream of starry-eyed and lubricious stars“.
Kursaal or Cine Madrid
A curious space that was a fronton, boxing ring but also cinema and concert cafe (and one of the most alternative). Here Fornarina would premiere La Primavera, Chelito would perform and even Mata Hari herself. Today, the building still stands on the corner of Plaza del Carmen and Tetuán Street and houses a large appliance and technology store.
Trianon
“The cathedral of the genre ínfimo (…)” that was born in Alcalá Street in 1911, at that time when the cuplé was already for everyone with less “scandalous” shows. Inaugurated with a performance by La Goya, with its “refinement” it became the antithesis of the Apolo.
New Romea
The competition of the Trianon on Carretas Street. According to Gloria G. Durán, it may have been one of the oldest (from 1903). Here performed the Bella Belén, the Chelito or the Fornarina.
Encomienda Cinema
In the street of the same name in the neighborhood of Lavapiés. A place that Durán calls “cochambroso” and where the dramatic Raquel Meller was an absolute star.
The salons
Curious that in a “sepia-colored” Madrid, the cuplé was interpreted in salons with color names, such as the Bleu and the Rouge (very close to each other on Alcalá Street). But there were also the Salón Japonés, the Salón de Billar, the Happy House…
Chantecler Saloon
A classic of the first decade of the twentieth century that is also an example of that entrepreneurial woman. La Chelito, after traveling half of Europe and returning from Cuba, bought a plot of land in the Plaza del Carmen and ordered the construction of this salon, which today occupies the Muñoz Seca Theater.
The nights of the cuplé
We make a time jump, since this singing café was one of the last survivors in Madrid. Located at number 51 Calle de la Palma, it was born in 1978 thanks to its owner and cupletista, Olga Ramos. It closed in 1999, the last gasp of the cuplé.
And today, what remains? “The truth is that there is a revisitation more from the study and research, with books such as Gloria G. Durán or ¡Ay, campaneras! by Lidia García,” says Irene Doher.
There are still, however, the Livianas Provincianas, who follow the legacy of women like Olga Ramos: “She used an old repertoire and revisited it in terms of Madrid in the 60s and 70s and from a humorous point of view. A cupletista has to play with her weapons and know what differentiates her from the rest. We rely on humor, interpretation and interaction with the audience,” Paloma concludes.
There are also some places with improvised stages (such as the Hipócritas Bar-Teatro that Paloma tells us about) where cabaret, vaudeville, cuplé, drag and whatever else comes up, reigns again.