The history of the COMPAÑÍA NACIONAL DE DANZA is firmly linked, in turn, to Spain's most recent history. This affords us the security that this Company is not some sort of test tube baby, shut up in an hygienic glass bell, isolated from viruses and germs of all sorts, but rather in full contact with society, the very society for which it works, to which it belongs and to which it owes itself, both for the good and the bad, since life within a community is like that and not in a different way.

Let us say that the Compañía Nacional de Danza, advancing in the adventure of its consolidation, has been moving like a pendulum, in terms of style, in accordance with its environment. Something similar to what has happened to Spanish society- in the most widely differing fields- in the learning and development processes of its modernity.

Also, our lack of ballet tradition, except in the field of ethnic dance-which, on the other hand, has contributed very significantly to dance at world level- may have promoted a prolonged state of ambiguity: This lead to the Company being directed by persons so diverse, although so specifically qualified for the post, as Víctor Ullate, María de Ávila, Ray Barra and Maya Plisetskaya.
All these proved able to endow the Company with a fresh and promising air. It was then striving to achieve its own identity, despite the trauma of the lack of a ballet tradition on which to lay solid foundations.

This search for an identity inevitably was affected by a polemical debate, which now belongs to the past, between classicists and modernists, which lingered on until the eighties. This debate confronted, with harshness, the jealous custodians of classical ballet orthodoxy, symbolised by the sacred canons of the five positions, the patriarch Marius Petipa, the splendid Russian School and its diaghilevian hatching, with those wanting a break-off. The latter, lead by Isadora Duncan's voluble hand, followed the paths showed by Ruth Saint Denis, Ted Shawn and Doris Humphrey and culminated in Martha Graham's overflowing garden- and that of her European counterpart, Mary Wigman. In the very fertile lands of these, Mece Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Alwin Nikolaïs and so many others subsequently flourished.

Nevertheless, towards the end of the decade, the debate which separated both sides became increasingly obsolete, thanks, basically, to two factors:

The first factor was the wide appeal of the so-called neo-classical ballet, which resulted from the spell of that wizard of choreography who is Maurice Béjart. He scuba-dived, so to speak- with an equal dose of versatility and success- in the stormy, but in long term so grateful, waters of synthesis. Béjart wrote, basing himself on the legitimacy conferred by the unanimous applause of his enormous audiences that: "One can mix into one traditional classicism, post-Graham American dance, folkloric dance, and research on movement and space. And all this would be modern or not. It is only a question of inventiveness ".

The second factor refers directly to the consecration of postmodernism as the surpassing of the sanctification of the conglomerate of attitudes that, by being excessively bold, may become uncouth. Once a creator breaks free of the obligation of being modern- a constraining factor like all obligations- he or she tends to feel extensively relived and this blows fresh air into his or her creativity and stimulates his or her inventiveness.