travelswithalice

September 08, 2007

Flamenco!

At El Arenal in Seville.

The restaurant is in a restored 17th century building and we almost miss the entrance because it looks like the back door. At the table next to ours, two Japanese teenagers smile and nod in greeting. There's a touristy buzz all around. The place has the look and feel of an old fashioned night club with middle-aged waiters in formal black waiter suits.

This is our first flamenco experience and Stuart and I fervently hope that our hotel manager hasn't directed us to a watered-down, made for tourists version. We needn't have worried. Dinner is unremarkable but the flamenco does not disappoint.

The choreography is exhilarating, tempestuous. The guitar music is heartrendingly beautiful, the singing passionate, tormented. The performance is polished and the styling exquisite.

(I especially like the women's sleek hairstyles kept in place with jeweled combs worn in a row on only one side of the head. Very aristo chic.)

One sour note: Stuart is incensed when they won’t let him use his videocam.

At La Taberna Flamenco in Jerez de la Frontera.

Although Seville attracts Flamenco’s best talents and hosts the Flamenco Biennale, Jerez is recognized as the genre’s birthplace.

La Taberna Flamenco is in a warehouse festooned with implements used in olive oil production. It looks like the setting for a barn dance. There is no air conditioning and I wonder how the performers will survive the heat.

Still smarting from the videocam ban in the Seville tablao, Stuart doesn't bother to take his paparazzi equipment to this show. No such ban here, so I take lo-tech photos and videos with my trusty little Canon IXUS.

Unlike the polished theater of the flamenco we saw in Seville, costumes here are low-budget and the performers look unkempt. But wow, this is exciting stuff!

The music is more fiery, less anguished. There seems to be more laughter and the cheers the performers call out to each other are more boisterous.

The dancing has an improvised, spontaneous feel. Wild and frantic, the steps are coarser; a female dancer jumps and stomps around ungracefully but to theatrical effect.

This is not the "deep song of the soul" that I thought flamenco is supposed to be. I expected it to be all about misery and pain, love and rejection, life and death.

These flamenco artists actually seem to be enjoying themselves. They're even drinking on stage! Wine is passed around, as in a party. (I guess that's one way to beat the heat.)

This is a more accessible form of flamenco for uninitiated spectators like me. I find it seductive and exciting because it's not too much of a struggle to understand the emotions that the performers portray in music and dance.

After the show, they mill around at the back of the hall. A dancer scoops up a baby into her arms and nuzzles it playfully. She's at my side, dancing and playing with the child, unmindful of the audience she has now completely lost interest in.

Outside, a girl of about 7 or 8 laughs as she launches into her own performance to the clapping accompaniment of her mother.