It always takes a while to recover from the Bienal de Sevilla - the experience of seeing a different performance every night is quite draining - even if one only stays in Sevilla for a minor part of the Bienal, as we did in 2008. The density of experience is such that one has jumbled and confused feelings about what one has seen. Some performances are large and elaborate dance productions with as many as fifty dancers and musicians such as the production "Café de Chinitas” by the Ballet Nacional de España. But it is not the big productions that stay with one, necessarily, more often it is the performance of a single artist.

The performance that I best remember is that of Segundo Falcón. Falcón is a cantaor, now thirty eight, born in El Viso de Alcor, twenty five kilometers east of Sevilla, who began to sing professionally at the age of eight, in a local peña, and by the age of twenty was performing regularly at the famous tablao of Los Gallos in Sevilla.

It is not alone the wonderful artistry of Falcón that I remember, it is the warmth of the ambience created between him and his audience. It resulted in an experience which is not exportable – it couldn’t happen away from Sevilla, or at least away from Andalucía.

A flamenco performance in Sevilla is not just a celebration of the artist, it is a celebration of the community from which the artist comes. There is an intensity of feeling within the Sevillano community which perhaps can be related back to the history of seventy years ago.

In the early nineteen thirties Sevilla was called Sevilla la Roja – Red Sevilla. Most of the workers in Sevilla and the surrounding peublos were members of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) – the wildly impractical and sometimes violent anarchist workers movement. When the country wobbled towards civil war in 1935-1936 the rightist factions focused on Andalucía as the first target of any move to seize power from the center left Republican government. So it was that the first action of the military uprising in July of 1936 was the takeover of Sevilla by the falangist General Queipo de Llano. With only a hundred or so carabineers and some artillery he was able to force the city government to collapse in a matter of hours.(2)

In the working class districts of Sevilla there were barricades erected, but there were no weapons to support a response. Two days later troops from the Spanish Foreign Legion in Africa landed at the Sevilla airport, and then moved into the city to put down the threatened popular rising there. Their tactics were simple; kill as many as possible of the residents of the working class barrios which had shown opposition to the military golpe de estado. They came through the gitano quarter of Triana, where it was reported they went from house to house, pulling the men into the street where they were killed with knives, to save ammunition. Parts of Triana were then bombarded with artillery.

As well as working class activists they also targeted artists and left intellectuals, including the much revered flamenco historian (and Andalucian separatist) Blas Infante who was shot during these times, a few kilometers out of town on the road to Carmona (1). Four years after his execution he was condemned to death because “ in the years before 1936 he had acted as a propagandist ... for a separate Andalucia.”

Current estimates are that eight thousand people were killed in Sevilla in July 1936 (2)(3), in many cases without their families knowing of their fate. In a city of two hundred thousand people this amounts to ten percent of the adult males. (There are other estimates that run as high as forty seven thousand dead, but this seems unlikely, since that would be about half the adult male population.) A friend who grew up in Sevilla tells of her memories as a young girl – and this would be in the last days of the Franco dictadura – of times when her parents would make sure that the windows and shutters were closed before talking to a friend about the news of someone who had become a desaparecido.

Just before the Bienal of 2008, the city government announced that a bronze memorial plaque would be erected on the old city wall (Las Murallas) close to the barrio of San Julián in honor of those who were shot, some against the same walls, and the others who simply disappeared, ending up as anonymous bodies (los blancos – without papers) - delivered to the cemetery San Fernando, where there are records of five mass graves dating from that time. A monument would also be erected in the cemetery.(4)

In flamenco audiences now in Sevilla, some twenty percent or more must be people with a father or grandfather who was a victim of the repression.

In the last few months there has developed a new public willingness to talk about these tragedies. The judge Baltasar Garzon of the Supreme Court in Madrid has requested from the city government of Sevilla, information to support a record of the names of all those who died in the days and years after July 18 1936. He also intends to pursue an inquiry which would lead to the names of those responsible, almost all of whom are now dead. The Sevilla city government announced its intention to withdraw from Queipo de Llano certain honorifics which had been awarded to him in the past.(4) He died in 1951. The city also agreed to set up an office of inquiry to develop the facts of what happened in July of 1936. By an ironical coincidence the office will be housed in the building in the Plaza de la Gavidia which was Queipo de Llano's headquaters in July of 1936.(5)

After the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, there was general agreement in Spain that the terrible past should stay in the past, but now there is a willingness to recover it(6). Cante flamenco has always been a lament about sadness and repression. Soon, perhaps one can expect that the events of July 1936 will appear in the letra.