Flamenco dance

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Hailing from southern Spain’s outcast populations, flamenco dance and music drew early influences from Greek and Roman and later from Indian, Moorish, and Jewish cultures. With the arrival of the Moorish and Jewish populations to the Iberian peninsula centuries ago, Andalusia’s already thriving music and dance inadvertently began extracting characteristics from the newly-arrived populations.

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The flamenco dance and music that we see today are the dazzling results of centuries of absorbing and flawlessly sewing together elements of this myriad of diverse cultures.

♦ ◊   FLAMENCO, FLAMENCO   [2010]  ↓  [clips]

15 years after ‘Flamenco’, Carlos Saura returns brilliantly to a favoured subject and comes up with this sequel, ‘FLAMENCO, FLAMENCO’, which simply captures 21 brief, masterful flamenco performances. With famed cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor) behind the camera, Saura makes ingenious use of backdrops and scrims, each decorated as grand paintings and all framing the Flamenco dancers, singers, guitarists and other musicians who take the stage to reinterpret flamenco and all its sub-genres.

∇    El Tiempo  ↓  Juan Carlos Romero

∇  Israel Galván  ⇓

∇   Bulerías  ↓  Carpeta

∇   Alegrías  ↓  Sara Baras

Sara Pereyra Baras, born in San Fernando, Cadiz,  began studying dance at her mother’s school (Concha Bara) when she was just eight years old.

In 1997, Sara Baras presented her own company, with great critical and public success, at the closing of the 37^th Festival de Flamenco del Cante de las Minas. On April 2, 1998, with her company composed of herself, seven dancers and seven musicians, Sara launched a show entitled Sensaciones (sensations), an exploration of the diverse forms of flamenco.

Sara Baras is a popular personality,  constantly present in the world of the performing arts and in spheres quite unrelated to dance. Spain’s National Coinage and Stamp Factory used her image in a series of postage stamps that were presented at the World Philatelic Exhibition that took place in Madrid. She has modeled on runways for the fashion designer Amaya Arzuagea, and she has presented, together with members of her company, a lingerie collection for Triumph. Her image was also used by Cartier. She was even named “the face of Andalusia” as tourist ambassador of her home region.

She seems to have an endless supply of energy, unlimited glamour and creativity with no limits… which is even reflected in her name:  Sara Baras is a palindrome (it says the same thing from left to right as it does from right to left).

∇   Sara Baras en la Noche Blanca del Flamenco  ⇓  [2014]

¤  Bailaores  ⇓

An award-winning documentary directed by film-maker and dancer Albertina Pisano, is the intimate portrait of four outstanding artists of contemporary flamenco dance: Rafaela Carrasco, Israel Galván, Andrés Marín and Belén Maya.

∇  Farruquito  ⇓  [Sevilla_2014]

Juan Manuel Fernández Montoya a.k.a. Farruquito is the grandson of the well-known flamenco dancer Farruco and the current continuator of this saga. He is son of Juan el Moreno and La Farruca, and he made his debut when he was 5 in Broadway with the Flamenco Puro show. However, his great starting point was the film Flamenco by Carlos Saura. Later on, he starred in the show Pasado, presente, futuro in the Andalusian Pavilion of the 1992 Seville´s Universal Exhibition. Since Farruco´s death in 1997, Farruquito has become the main exponent of the family, making important performances worldwide.

∇  Joaquín Cortés  ⇓  [siguiriyas]

In a flamenco performance, the dancer – or bailaor(a) – will often stand motionless for the first moments absorbing the strums of the guitar, the clapping, and the singing until the inspiration hits him/her. Then he or she will launch into a flamenco dance every bit as passionate as the song being belted out by the cantaor– you can actually see the explosion of emotions in the dancer’s facial expressions throughout the performance.

The role of the flamenco dancer is essentially to physically interpret the words with light, graceful arm movements that contrast the reverberating steps as feet drill into the floor with a bewildering intensity. The zapateado or intricate footwork displayed by the dancer was not introduced into the female dance routine until the early twentieth century.

The decrees of the 16th century, where Moors, Jews, and gipsies were persecuted, resulted in these outcasts going underground, and taking with them their music and dances, and this is where it stayed, and this is thought to be the very beginning of the formation of flamenco.

The style of dance we see performed today has changed considerably since these times, and now styles of flamenco song that were never danced are being taken up by modern dancers striving to find new directions for the flamenco dance.

←feat… Daniel Saltares + Paloma Fantova

◊  ♦  Eva la Yerbabuena  ↓  bailaora

Eva Yerbabuena. Eva María Garrido García. Francfort (Germany), 1970. Daughter of an emigrant Spanish worker, in spite of which she has been involved in flamenco all her life; at the age of sixteen she was already living in Granada. She is a complete dancer, with a technique that marvelously includes a most jondo feeling. She started studying flamenco in Granada, where she eventually created her own Art School in Granada. In 1992, she was awarded La Malena Prize in Cordoba for her soleá, but she refused it as she felt they had awarded precisely the dance she considered she had danced worse and that other prizes were not deserved due to their quality.

← seguirillas  

Born in Sevilla, she is internationally renowned for her personal aesthetic concept of the art of flamenco. Using the fundamental codes of the Flamenco language, researching within and beyond this language, Pagés has proved to be a pioneer in the understanding of Flamenco as an Art in evolution, contemporary and alive. She has overcome cultural differences in her choreographies, convinced that artistic interchange favors better understanding between human beings. In her own words, Flamenco is a clear example of how the union of cultures, races and religions, can create a common echo.

♦  Santiago Lara ↓ Bienal Flamenco 2010 

cante =  el Londro;    baile =  Mercedes Ruiz;    piano = Jesús Lavilla.

Baile (dance) = Mercedes Ruiz. Born in 1980 in Jerez de la Frontera, Cadiz, Spain, she joined the company of Manuel Morao and Gitanos de Jerez when she was 7, collaborating with them several months first in Madrid, and afterwards in New York City (Town Hall Theater, Plymouth Theater) and Canada (Golden Lion Theater).  Mercedes Ruiz began her career as a soloist in 2002. She performed with Andrés Peña in the prestigious season of the Centro Cultural de El Monte (Sevilla) and the Festival Mont de Marsan (France). Additionally, she was on tour in Japan with Belén Maya. She also performed in the New Flamenco Festival of Los Angeles and the Bienal de Sevilla with the Andrés Marín Company, both in 2002.

◊  Ángeles Gabaldón ⇓  Solea

feat… ⇓  Maria Juncal + Mª José Franco + Juan de Juan

♦  . . .  from Madrid  ↓  El Güito

♠→ José Losada «El Carrete» ↓  (from Torremolinos)

♠→Rocío Molina  ↓  El Sol, La Sal, El Son [Andalusian TV] – another dancer from Málaga

∇   ‘Bosque Ardora’   ⇓