Group Aims to Preserve and Promote Flamenco

Matilde Nunez gripped the edge of her wooden chair and strained to watch the little girl as she grabbed her ruffled skirts and sashayed across the stage.

“That’s it, Bonita, that’s the way to do it,” wailed the proud aunt of 7-year-old Manuela Nunez, whose dancing stole the show at an outdoor performance about Spanish Gypsy life. “That’s the way to keep it alive.”

Keeping flamenco alive is what both the new Andalucian Flamenco Foundation and Matilde Nunez want to do.

She and her gypsy family and neighbors in Jerez’s Santiago neighborhood don’t have much time for lectures on the evolution of the cante hondo --the song from the depth of the soul--or arguing about the origin of the word flamenco.

But they do turn out in force, complete with bottles of sherry, ham sandwiches and babies, for “This Way of Life,” a show that tells the story of Spanish gypsies through dancing, singing, guitar playing and hand-clapping in a style that has come to characterize the rhythm of southern Spain.

The show by author Tomas Rodriguez-Pantoja and director Manuel Morao features many Jerez gypsies and was the highlight of a conference in June, “Two Centuries of Flamenco,” sponsored by the foundation--its first official activity since inauguration in May.

To conserve the memory of flamenco, to promote research into the art and to make contemporary flamenco known to as wide a public as possible are the principal aims of the foundation, according to director Joaquin Carrera.

The foundation, housed in a refurbished 18th-Century mansion in the heart of the Santiago neighborhood--the shrine of flamenco for many--has a record, video and book library as well as a dance hall. It has a $350,000 budget.

“Flamenco itself is a world of conflict,” Carrera said. “Flamencologists have a tendency to expostulate, not to ask questions, and we thought this might take up too much time, especially for the foreigners who were attending.”

When a Mexican conference attendee asked about the meaning of the word flamenco, there was an embarrassed silence, as though someone had asked about the origin of the word Christian in a church.

But Bernard Leblon, professor of Gypsy and Andalucian culture at the French University of Perpignan, offered the explanation that the term referred to the Gypsies who had been forced into military service in the fife and drum corps of the Spanish regiments fighting in Flanders in the Low Countries in the 17th Century. Flamenco is the Spanish word for a Fleming or a native of Flanders.

Another theory has it that the word derives from the Arabic fela-mengh, or immigrant peasant, and that many of the cantes or styles of flamenco songs were influenced by Moors who occupied most of Spain for eight centuries.

Although opinion varies over the current health of flamenco, most “flamencologists” concur that the art form was first pulled from near oblivion by Spanish composer and musician Manuel de Falla in June, 1922, when he organized a cante hondo contest in Granada.

Late 19th-Century Spanish intellectuals such as Jose Ortega y Gasset had declared flamenco vulgar and looked to northern Europe for their musical inspiration.

After fierce suppression after the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, flamenco was appropriated by the authoritarian regime of Gen. Francisco Franco.

The subsequent stylization of flamenco forms in staged shows and films contributed much to the cliche of the “Spain of the tambourine and castanets”--rejected by Spanish youth, who look to foreign music as an expression of rebellion and independence.

The publication of “Flamencologia” by Anselmo Gonzalez Climent in 1957 marked the acceptance, once again, by the intelligentsia of flamenco as a basic element in Spanish culture.

A contest the year before in Cordoba for cantaores, singers of flamenco, also renewed interest.

But many students of the art point out that flamenco is not universally popular in Spain and that many Spaniards are embarrassed by foreign assumptions that flamenco is the nation’s national music.

Critic Angel Alvarez Caballero said flamenco has serious box-office problems. In a country where about 100 flamenco festivals are held each summer, half lose money and few would be possible without the support of local city or provincial councils.

In Madrid, where 20 public flamenco taverns existed a decade ago, just five or six remain.

Many aficionados have taken refuge in penas, private flamenco clubs that invite artists to perform regularly, perpetuating the essentially intimate nature of the art.

Leblon, who places himself on the side that argues the determinant Gypsy role in flamenco history, said he believes that many Spaniards cannot accept flamenco as a serious art form because of its gypsy connections.

But many of flamenco’s most celebrated performers--such as guitarist Paco de Lucia and cantaor Antonio Fernandez Diaz “Fosforito”--are not even gypsies.