Flamenco, Taken to Extremes
Get ready for another shakeup of what you think flamenco is.
The annual Irvine Barclay New World Flamenco Festival, now in its second year, has stated its intention to expand local audiences’ ideas about the dance form. For 2002, it is bringing two extreme companies from Spain.
Compania Juana Amaya and Compania Flamenca Andres Marin are, in fact, exact opposites of each other, according to Yaelisa, single-named and head of her own company in San Francisco as well as artistic director of the festival. Amaya honors the past; Marin the future, Yaelisa said. Her company, Caminos Flamencos, which will also perform, represents a more middle ground.
“Most of the young flamenco artists are trying to push the envelope and trying to be innovative,” Yaelisa explained, speaking from company offices in San Francisco. “Juana Amaya is not. She goes the other way. Her stand is, ‘There’s nothing wrong with flamenco. It doesn’t need all this other stuff.’ She’s in the vein of pure traditional Gypsy-style flamenco. Her goal is to preserve that style.
“Andres’ whole bag is innovation, pushing the envelope and getting a new way of movement that no male flamenco has moved in before. Many people did not like his style. They felt it was not flamenco. He didn’t begin achieving acclaim in Spain until two years ago. Flamenco is evolving, and if anyone is evolving it, he’s the guy.”
Amaya, 28, was born into a Gypsy family in the village of Moron de la Frontera, a cradle of Spanish flamenco. She learned to dance from her uncles, cousins and close relatives.
“That is typical of the Gypsy-style dancers,” Yaelisa said. “Many of them never took a class in flamenco in their life. They wouldn’t dream of it. Many have almost a disdain for training and technique and studying. The style has a rawness and even brutality.”
“In Gypsy families, there are always people who dance or play the guitar,” Amaya told a German interviewer recently. “At the age of 6, I already danced in a show.”
She was discovered by flamenco great Mario Maya, who made her a featured dancer in several of his shows as soon as she turned 14. She worked with him for three years, touring the world and performing in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall in New York to the Carre Sylvia Monfort Hall in Paris. She formed her own company in 1994.
Of her appearances that year in London, Mary Clark wrote in the Guardian that Amaya “excels in the more tragic, introspective aspects of flamenco.” Covering the same concert, John Percival wrote in the London Times that Amaya “provides a broody, soulful note, but after she has suffered touchingly through ... false endings, I am happy that she summons up a flash of anger to fight back at the end against whatever her cruel fate is supposed to be.”
She backtracked into big-show flamenco a bit however, dancing the title role in a 1996 production of “Carmen” and in a 1999 production of the opera “El Cid,” both in Seville, Spain.
Of her Carmen, Jesus Vigorra wrote in El Correo de Andalucia, “Juana Amaya does not need to fake her way through the interpretation of Carmen. She is a woman of the people, a Gypsy and an artist.”
But she regards those performances as different from her own dancing. “I made theater, but in theater companies,” she said. “This is yet another form of working. This is flamenco mixed with theater.”
She isn’t opposed to experimentation, but she does believe in truth in labeling.
“You can’t always go on like 100 years ago,” she said. “But we also have to respect what the flamenco is. Otherwise you can’t call it flamenco, call it ‘flamenco-fusion’ or something else. But don’t call something flamenco which isn’t puro, puro.”
Marin, whose mother was a flamenco singer and whose father--after whom he is named--a flamenco dancer, doesn’t see himself as an innovator so much as an independent artist.
“That’s what people, the critics, the press say,” Marin said of the label. He was speaking recently from Seville. “I have the traditional training, and I go out on stage and do what I want to do.”
So what’s the controversy?
“His movement style has been described in so many different ways by people who don’t like it or find it fascinating,” Yaelisa said. “He’s toned it down recently. When I first saw him, he looked very vampire-like and contorted. He would get into the strangest positions--deep lunges, twists and contortions. Anti-flamenco. Or rather, anti-stereotypical flamenco.
“His posture, for instance, the effect is to round his back forward instead of stretching the back and presenting the chest in a very proud way. He goes to the other extreme. He doesn’t believe in it, doesn’t like it, doesn’t feel it.”
“In someone else, you may find more beauty, more technical prowess, more diplomacy, however you will never find anyone like him,” wrote Agnes Benoist in the Lyon Figaro in January. “His flexible body cuts through space like a bow--his stomach protruding a little too much and his shoulders receding a little too far, leaving any flamenco academy begging to correct his posture. He has a false offhand manner that fails to hide his devoted passion.”
“I like dance that comes from the gut, that hurts,” Marin once told a Spanish interviewer. “I like real dancing.”
He also rubbed people the wrong way when he criticized what he called commercial flamenco. “To do a movement which is preconceived to please the audience, that’s the worst thing. It doesn’t reach me. I like serious dance, straightforward dance. The rest is academic, plastic, pretty. You sell it and make money, and there’s never any problem because everyone says, ‘Ole.’ ”
Since his debut in 1993, his style has been evolving. “I think of dancing more minimally now, keeping the body more simple,” he said.
His “Mas Alla del Tiempo” (Beyond Time), which he will dance at the festival, illustrates that by taking place within subtle squares of light amid islands of semi-darkness. And then there’s the music. Instead of using only the guitars, songs and clapping hands of traditional flamenco, he adds an otherworldly aura through Gregorian chant, and accompaniment by violin, string bass, clarinet and accordion.
“Music is very personal to me and important,” Marin said, “not only listening, but breathing into what they’re singing. If you sing yourself, it’s better. I never did it professionally, but I still sing for myself.”
Spontaneity and improvisation are also important--a place where he and Amaya are in agreement.
“Structure is important when you are in a big theater, where you have to be aware of entrances and exits, but the more secure you are, the more technique you have, the more spontaneous you can be,” Marin said.
Marin seems to want to back off these days from some of his more radical statements attacking flamenco artists in general as being locked in the past and audiences as being more or less clueless.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with traditional flamenco,” he said. “If it’s well done, it can be beautiful and it can be great. But bad traditional flamenco is really bad.
“I don’t think people are so surprised by me anymore. People are getting more and more open to new ideas, and also in the last five years, so many other new dancers have been coming up, it’s not only me who is being different.”
Yaelisa and Caminos Flamencos, the third troupe in the festival, fall between the other two groups.
“I don’t espouse just one philosophy or another,” Yaelisa said. “I like to do contemporary things. But in this show, ‘Desde Cadiz Pa Aca’ [From Cadiz to Here], I’m looking into the past, at the golden age of flamenco in the 1940s to the ‘60s, and trying to bring it to life in the year 2002. It speaks to tradition, but it looks forward too. I’ve gone back and forth that way in my interest in looking for other avenues of expression and also wanting to keep this heritage alive.”
Yaelisa said that she hopes the contrasts in this year’s festival have an impact.
“Last year, I didn’t want to take too much of a risk the first year, neither did the festival’s producer, Douglas Rankin.”
But this year, the styles should do more to fulfill her goals: “I wanted to not just present flamenco artists to Southern California, but to show the gamut of styles that really exists in flamenco.”
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NEW WORLD FLAMENCO FESTIVAL, Irvine Barclay Theater, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Dates: Compania Juana Amaya, Friday, Saturday and next Sunday; Yaelisa and Caminos Flamencos, Aug. 13-14; and Compania Flamenca Andres Marin, Aug. 16-18. Weekdays and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 6 p.m. Prices: $28-$38. Phone: (949) 854-4646.
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Chris Pasles is a Times staff writer.