Gala Flamenca and Flamenco Festival

In the vastness of the Merriam Theater for Gala Flamenca, I could pretend for a moment that I was again in that club in Seville. A single dancer, dressed in black, barely visible against a black background, only face and hands reflecting flashes of light, drew me back. The dancer was both the music and the form. The rhythm came from his feet. The sonorous voice of the cantaor evoking pain and pathos and longing and who knows what else — I didn’t have a clue what the words meant — became my pain.

The dancers (Carlos Rodríguez, Jesus Carmona, Lucía Campillo) danced, preening, commanding “look at me.” Guitar, violin, drum, clapping hands, pounding feet. They cast a spell, and I couldn’t look away. Then Antonio Canales appeared, wearing a loose shirt, and exuding the ease and confidence of the old master who has done it all before. He smiled, he smirked, he played with the rest of the company on stage. It was effortless. Three women (Karime Amaya, Lucía Campillo, Carmen Coy) in red dresses with flounces so voluminous that they became dance partners, filled the stage with another energy.

Seeing Rosario Toledo perform Vengo at WHYY was seeing flamenco in a whole new light: This was traditional and modern dance together. Toldeo wore sneakers as well as tap shoes, a short dress, and even a bathing suit. At one point she danced barefoot. The stage was covered with sand and water, and the music was jazz, not Spanish folklorica. This was not the flamenco I remembered, but it was equally seductive.

The performance was part of the Philadelphia Flamenco Festival, which offers lectures and classes and examples of flamenco as an ongoing, ever-changing art form, one that is trying to change the traditional rules and gender roles of the past.

And thus began my lessons in the origins and history of flamenco.

Commenting on the rules through breaking the rules

“It can be a pleasure just dancing traditional flamenco for what it is,” says Elba Hevia y Vaca, who organized this year’s festival, although her focus has been on innovation and empowerment for women. That’s why she has created Pasión y Arte Flamenco Company, a local all-female flamenco dance troupe, and why she has invited so many innovators of the form — like Toledo, and Israel Galván and his sister Pastora Galván — to participate in the festival.

But the history of flamenco is a part of the changes that are now occurring in the form. “The strategies to break the rules are also commentary on those rules,” said Michelle Heffner Hayes, PhD, who gave a presentation on the elements of flamenco and chaired a symposium on flamenco and popular culture as part of the festival.

Flamenco, which is a fusion of cultures — Arabic, Romani (Gypsy), Sephardic Jewish, North African, Indian, Spanish folklore, Latin American, and Carribean — started as a dance of the lower classes, then moved to the stage (the cafés cantantes), then the opera, until now it has become a representation of Spanish culture itself. Along the way, it turns out, it has had to shake some controversial gender stereotypes (the image of Carmen as seductress, for one) and some racial ones (it has connections to blackface and minstrel traditions), as well as the rigid rules that govern traditional performances (men and women have different stances and hand and arm movements).

As culture has changed, so has flamenco. And as the form is taught in various countries, it takes on characteristics of those countries. In this country, it draws from (and has connections with) blues, jazz, tap, and breakdancing, which are all also music and dance forms that originated from the streets and have grown into representations of American culture.

And now that I know all this, I wonder, does it matter? Do I need the history to appreciate the form, or can I just go and watch the dancers and enjoy the music? For the innovators in any field the challenge is to make what is old and traditional relevant again while at the same time creating an art form that others want to see. If they’ve done their job, do I need to know it, or can I just go to the theater and once again be that young woman in a smoky club in Seville who fell in love with the dance?