EFE
The dancer, better known by her stage name The Chungahas died at the age of 87, as confirmed by his son, Luis Gonzalvo, on the Antena 3 television program And now, Sonsoles. The creator had been facing lung cancer for more than a decade: she was diagnosed in 2011, announced that she had overcome it, but it reappeared in the final phase of her life. La Chunga was considered one of the references of flamenco and became a real star in the sixties, both nationally and internationally. She also became famous because she used to perform barefoot. For years, La Chunga lived in a nursing home.
The artist was born in 1938 in Marseille, but grew up in Barcelona. He started dancing when he was only six years old, in the bars of his neighborhood in the Catalan capital. And there the painter Paco Rebés discovered it, according to the Europa Press agency. Little by little, he built a career that took him to the most famous tablaos in Spain and New York. He performed in Europe, America, Asia and Australia. He even danced at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 1965.
Throughout his life, he also managed to stand out in another art: naive style painting, on which he concentrated especially from the nineties onwards, as he moved away from the stage. His unique style fascinated writers such as or painters like Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dalí. The specialized website Imdb also includes the creator’s time in cinema: five films as an actress, including With your back to the doorby José María Forqué, or The law of a raceby José Luis Gonzalvo, who was her husband and with whom she had three children.
UNKNOWN (EFE)
The frenzy that La Chunga transmitted with her dance caught the attention of Dalí, who proposed a very special work, a canvas that he arranged on the floor on which he left several tubes of paint. To the sound of Ramón Gómez’s guitar, the dancer moves barefoot on the canvas, spreading the color and thus creating a new art, painting with her feet, Europa Press reports. Among many other recognitions, he received the Gold Medal from the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid.
