For the creator or presenter of flamenco shows there is always a question: What kind of flamenco?

Should one be faithful to the image of traditional flamenco? Or is that not what the public wants? Should we modernize it? Spice it up a bit? Would that eventually lead to the destruction of the traditional forms?

Traditional flamenco is usually referred to as flamenco puro. In the Spanish language puro means the same as pure in English, that is: unadulterated. But there is another meaning ... in the caló language. In caló, the word puro means old, antique, and hence traditional*. It is not clear which meaning predominates when the phrase flamenco puro is used ... by flamencos.

What is flamenco puro anyway? Is it a bar, una peña at two o’clock in the morning with four or five middle aged Sevillanos sitting on chairs in the corner, and then one begins to sing? Is that it? Can be, that’s puro, in either meaning. Is it Bernarda de Utrera, after midnight, an old woman being helped out onto the stage at the Hotel Triana, as the full moon rises behind her, to sing a solea en homenaje to her sister Fernanda who is dying of dementia; as she sings the tears are running down her cheeks and most of the audience are crying too? That’s puro, claro.

But performing flamenco puro doesn’t get you rich, so people look around for a way to change it so the masses will come. Joaquin Cortes did it by listening to his English and Italian publicists and ended up dancing boring footwork with lots of smoke and mirrors and no shirt, in football stadiums with fifty thousand people. Fifty thousand people who might have learned something about flamenco ... maybe. But. it’s also possible that when the masses come to see that, they leave without understanding what flamenco really is, anyway.

Then there is flamenco ballet, based on a story, like when Aida Gómez made a show, first at the Festival de Jerez in 2002; a show based on the legend of Sampson and Salome. The head of Sampson was danced by a guy in a black cloak with his head poking up through a silver plate It looked like his head, Sampson’s head, was sitting on the plate, floating around the stage. And Aida, then principal dancer of the Ballet National de España, she danced around and then did the dance of the seven veils, ending up desnudo except for a flesh colored thong. (Carlos Saura made a movie about it. You can get it from Flamenco-world.com, but it’s only in PAL format.) A famous flamenca said, after the show: “Fue interesante, ¿no? pero no fue flamenco.”

There is another question that is raised when some flamenco performances are advertised as being gypsy flamenco, and the public interprets that as being the genuine thing, and by symmetry, if a performance is not gypsy flamenco, whatever that is, then it is somehow not the genuine thing. This is a cause of considerable distaste among some flamencas who, having spent a decade or two in Spain, performing with gitano artists and payo artists, come back to the US and then, five years down the road, some young dancer who has just spent twelve months in Sevilla comes back to be billed as doing gypsy flamenco.

Gypsy flamenco at its best is a casual and natural style of performance which tells us that the artist is completely at home in his or her art. At its worst it is full of little tricks, like grinning at the audience, or, for the bailaora turning ones back to the audience and shaking ones bum, and for the bailaor, coming on wearing a three piece suit and after a few measures, taking off the jacket and throwing it on the floor. Then there's the quick turn which, while spotting the head, produces a fine spray of supposed sweat from the hair; an earthy touch that, but some of us know that the sweat was actually water sprayed from a bottle just before he came on.

Should we worry about trying to preserve flamenco puro anyway? Can one make flamenco more accessible to audiences without destroying it? How do we bring young people into the audiences?

No easy answers.

* Francisco de Sales Mayo, Francisco Quindalé, El gitanismo, historia, costumbres y dialecto de los gitanos, y Un Diccionario Caló-Castellano, Madrid, 1870. Quindalé presented one of the larger dictionaries of caló, but it is possible that a few of what he describes as caló words are really castellano (Spanish) words modified so that they are gitano slang rather than words from a different language. Interestingly, one of the words he lists as a caló word is bulerías, which he defines as meaning embusteria – a lie or a cheating. The usual explanation of the word bulerías is that it derives from the castellano word burlar, to tease. There is no evidence to show that Quindale knew that a bulerías was a flamenco palo – he does not mention flamenco and indeed in 1870 the word flamenco had not yet come to mean the art form.

 

Flamenquito 2007