Eugenio Balder

Balder in the room off Calle de la Cruz, Doña Cañerías and a torero figure beside him, the walls papered in his own old show posters. Photo via Fondo documental Marino Gómez-Santos, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.

Somewhere in a private Madrid archive sits a page in Eugenio Balder's own handwriting, and it quietly settles an argument nobody outside Spain ever knew was worth having. One account of his 1906 debut names the Teatro de la Latina. Another names the Teatro Romea. Balder's own hand explains both: he opened at the Latina on June 5, then reappeared at the Romea that November and stayed on stage there through the following spring.^[3] That's the kind of correction that only turns up when somebody finally goes looking in the man's own language, in his own words. Balder spent close to sixty years working stages in Spain and Argentina, shaved off the mustache his own teachers hid behind, built every figure he ever used with his own two hands in a half-basement off a Madrid side street, and ended up, decades after his death, with his actual recorded voice playing again beside the very puppets he carved, inside a national museum. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about Balder.

The name on the manual

He was born Eugenio Balderraín Santamaría in Madrid on February 10, 1878, Basque by family, Madrid by birth, what one Spanish blog calls "vasco injerto en madrileño," a Basque grafted onto a Madrileño.^[1][2][4] "Balder" was the stage name, but it was never much of a disguise. His own ventriloquism manual, the treatise he published during his Argentina years, carried "Balderraín" right there on the cover.^[4] Anybody who bought the book already knew the man behind the name. It was only decades later, when a Find a Grave memorial spelled out the full legal name for an English-language record that had only ever known him as Balder, that the clipping became visible again outside Spain.^[1]

Two theaters, one debut year

The record, once you read it in his own hand, runs clean. Balder debuted at the Teatro de la Latina on June 5, 1906. He reappeared that same year, November 1, at the Teatro Romea, and stayed there through the end of May 1907, closing with a farewell performance because he was leaving for America on an advantageous contract.^[3] In 1909 he sailed for Argentina, spent several years there, built real success, and published his treatise on ventriloquism, the one with his real name on the cover.^[2][4] He came back to Spain at the end of 1911 and reappeared, fittingly, at the Teatro Romea, the house that had launched him.^[2]

The clean shave

The ventriloquists who came before him, Sanz included, wore a heavy mustache for a practical reason: it hid the mouth and covered up any trouble with labial consonants.^[2] Balder broke with that. He was, by the account of the Spanish blog Ventriloquía y más, "the first to shave off the mustache" that his own precursors, Juliano and Sanz among them, had used to cover their mouths.^[2][4] That same blog calls him a "revolucionador del género," a revolutionizer of the genre, for it.^[4] He broke with the trade a second way too. Sanz ran his automata company with a paid team of collaborators and mechanics behind him. Balder built every figure himself, alone, in a semi-basement workshop on Madrid's Calle de la Cruz, and did all his own repairs there for as long as he worked.^[2][10] One historian's judgment on the two men, writing decades later in that same Spanish blog, called Balderraín "el más aclamado de todos," the most acclaimed of them all, and Sanz's greatest rival.^[2] Neither man is diminished by the other's method. One built a company. One built alone at a bench. Both filled rooms for thirty years doing it their own way.

A company built by hand

The figures that came off that basement bench had names Madrid audiences knew by heart: Don Cleto, the refined and slightly ridiculous Doña Cañerías, the pint-sized bullfighter Gaonilla, sometimes billed as Gaona Chico, "de irresistible comicidad," irresistibly funny by the trade's own description, and Luisito Kiriki, proud of being a "gurriato," the local nickname for someone born in El Escorial.^[2][4] Kiriki carries a claim worth sitting with: the same source calls him a precursor of "Jaimitismo," the whole later Spanish tradition of stock kid-joke characters built around a figure named Jaimito, arriving in Balder's act before Jaimito himself had even been invented.^[4] There was also a fashion designer named Serapio Florido, a joke folded into the job title itself since "modista" hadn't yet become the standard word for the trade, and a funereal flamenco pair, the singer billed as "El Niño de las Melancolías" and his guitarist, "El Niño de las Tristezas," the boy of melancholies and the boy of sorrows.^[4] Doña Cañerías did well enough outside the theater too: she won first prize at a Círculo de Bellas Artes carnival ball in Madrid sometime in the 1930s.^[3]

His years in Argentina left a permanent mark on the act. Around 1930 he built a new ensemble out of that experience, the Orquesta Criolla Madrid, Buenos Aires, an automaton troupe that joined his flamenco pair and a group of jota-singing baturros on the same bill.^[4] The whole company played rooms most ventriloquists never see: private homes of the Madrid aristocracy, occasions in front of royalty, and gala nights in the gardens of Retiro Park, sharing a program with the city's own Municipal Band under Ricardo Villa and the Engineers Regiment band under Pascual Marquina, the man who wrote "España cañí."^[4]

Spain's man in the Oracle

The International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists' magazine, The Oracle, tracked Balder as its eyes on Madrid. He was the correspondent who, in the January 1955 issue, reported that a fellow Spanish vent, Felipe Moreno, was "very active" and "giving splendid performances all over Spain."^[8] That same issue carried a flash item on Balder himself: fifty years into the art, the Brotherhood made him an honorary member on his golden anniversary.^[8] By May 1957 The Oracle noted he had just turned 79, with 53 of those years devoted to "the marvelous art," and that he was still giving shows.^[9] In November 1959, Spain's head of state, Francisco Franco, personally awarded him a decoration for "Exemplary Conduct," the Oracle's own coverage crediting him with sixty years popularizing ventriloquism, noting that he built his own figures and did all his own repairs, and that he had authored a book on the art. He was 82.^[10] Two months later, on his 82nd birthday, The Oracle ran his greeting to the membership and called him, plainly, the dean of the ventriloquists.^[11]

The bench outlasted the man

Balder in his later years, posed beside one of his own figures. He built every one of them himself, and did his own repairs, for as long as he worked.

Photo via Fondo documental Marino Gómez-Santos, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

Eugenio Balder

An early studio portrait. Find a Grave's own memorial record is what finally put his full legal name, Eugenio Balderraín Santamaría, back on the record outside Spain.

Photo: José L Bernabé Tronchoni, via Find A Grave

The record that outlived him

His voice survives on shellac. In San Sebastián in 1931 the Columbia Gramophone Company recorded him on a 78rpm disc, "Sesión de Radio," a comic parody of a radio broadcast, on the flip side "¡Pobre Celedonio!," a mock funeral oration. That disc survives in the private collection of Spanish radio historian Isidoro Ruiz-Ramos, callsign EA4DO, who inherited it from his own grandfather.^[4] Spain's Biblioteca Nacional holds more recordings from that same 1931 session.^[5] Balder's puppets themselves survive too, the whole Orquesta Criolla group, in the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional del Teatro in Almagro, Ciudad Real, one set among roughly 320 puppets the museum holds.^[5][6] When the museum reorganized that collection, it gave the Orquesta Criolla group dedicated exhibition space for the first time and wired in five sound fragments pulled from those same 1931 recordings, so a visitor standing in front of the actual figures hears the actual man again, after close to a century of silence.^[5] In 2024, museum conservators went a step further, presenting a project applying 3D scanning technology to recover and restore one of his figures for display.^[7]

The last years off Calle de la Cruz

He was married 32 years, by his own account very happily.^[3] When his wife died, Balder was left, in his own word for it, "atolondrado," distraught, and he turned back to the figures he'd spent his life building.^[3] He kept them nearby in that same small room off Calle de la Cruz where he'd always kept them, visiting them from their storage trunks, and by the account of the journalist who sat with him for what may have been his last interview, he worried, near the end, about what would become of them once he was gone.^[3] He died in his Madrid kitchen on November 22, 1964.^[1][3] He didn't need to worry. Sixty years later, his puppets have a room of their own in a national museum, and his own recorded voice plays beside them.

The circle

No performer works his whole life alone at a bench, not even one who built every figure himself.

Sixty years in the trade and the one thing that finally needed correcting was which theater he opened at, not which hand carved me. That's a batting average I'd sign for.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy