When the critic and exhibition organiser Richard Buckle presented his charity gala The Greatest Show on Earth at the London Coliseum in June 1971, he included the Spanish dancer Pilar López, who at 49 was approaching retirement and known to most of the audience only by repute. Yet her zarzuela solo fully held its own among an assembly of the greatest international stars. Perfect foot and arm placement and glittering castanet playing were among her special qualities.

The López family played a major part in building the big interest in the dances of Spain which flourished worldwide in the Thirties and Forties. Pilar’s older sister, Encarnación, known professionally as La Argentinita, had formed, jointly with the poet García Lorca, a company that Pilar, born in San Sebastián, joined after studying dance, singing and piano from the age of 6. They were substantially responsible for bringing gypsy flamenco out of sometimes disreputable bars and interesting wide audiences in it as a serious art. But they never restricted themselves to this one form, presenting, for instance, Ravel’s Bolero and Goyescas by Granados.

When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936 the company left Madrid and settled in the US, based in New York but touring widely. In 1945 Encarnación died, aged 50, and Pilar was persuaded to start a new company. The Pilar López Ballet Español preserved some of Encarnación’s productions, but added many new ones.

Her most famous creations were set to Manuel de Falla’s Three-cornered Hat and El Amor brujo (Love, the magician), besides Debussy’s Preludes and Images, Puerto de Tierra by Albéniz, and works by the Spanish composers Ernesto Halffter and Joaquín Rodrigo. The company also performed flamenco pieces and other Spanish folk dance forms.

Unlike other Spanish company leaders, López did not want to show herself as a star surrounded by lesser talents, preferring to present a true ensemble. She was especially successful in bringing on male dancers; among then José Greco, Manuelo Vargas and Antonio Gades, all of whom later achieved fame at the head of their own companies.

López brought her company to London in the 1950s and to the Edinburgh Festival. She stopped dancing in 1974 and retired in 1982, except for reviving her Concierto de Aranjuez, to Rodrigo’s music, for Gades’s Ballet Nacional Español and for the Ballet Nacional de España.

She was divorced from Tomás Rios, a conductor, in 1973.

Pilar López, dancer and choreographer, was born on June 4, 1912. She died on March 25, 2008, aged 95