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Text: Estela Zatania YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW IN NIMES DE LA FRONTERA The last day of the Nimes Festival ended spectacularly with a journey through the ages of flamenco, past, present and future, all co-existing and prospering harmoniously in the year 2012. Inés Bacán, the tradition, Rocío Molina, the now of flamenco dance and the Raperos Canasteros suggesting a possible route to the future. Throughout the Festival, in addition to shows, there have been film and documentary projections…Carlos Saura’s “Flamenco Flamenco”, the tribute to Moraíto “El Cante Bueno Duele”, Tony Gatlif’s “Vengo”…graphic exhibitions and courses of bulerías dancing, palmas and singing, an admirable program. Inés Bacán The first performance of the day was an acoustic cante recital by Lebrija singer Inés Bacán accompanied on guitar by Antonio Moya with the palmas of Bobote and Gonzalo Peña. The lady opened with tientos, followed by fandango por soleá – in Lebrija and Utrera this rhythmic way of interpreting the normally free-form cante has a very special flavor. Cantiñas, the way they’re felt in this part of the flamenco geography and played in E position which accentuates the inland sound so different from that of Cádiz. Antonio Moya deserves a medal for managing, thanks to his knowledge of cante, to carry a singer who is not at all easy to accompany. Soleá to the beat of soleá por bulería, another specialty of the Lebrija/Utrera axis, and the unadorned voice of Inés gives the touch of authenticity to local styles of Juaniquí and María Peña, as well as an interesting interpretation of the soleá of Rosalía de Triana. The singer also offered nanas, siguiriyas and bulerías with the characteristic compás of Lebrija. An encore of tonás wrapped up the recital. Rocío Molina “Vinática” Dance and choreography: Rocío Molina. Script: Roberto Fratini. Guitar and original music: Eduardo Trassierra. Cante, mandolin: José Ángel “Carmona”. Palmas and compás: José Manuel Ramos “El Oruco”. Music director: Rosario “La Tremendita”. The stage prepared in the same way as for Israel Galván two days earlier, in other words, empty, with no back drop or sets, gave away the post-modern concept and permanent questing that identifies both these dancers. Twenty minutes before the lights go down, you see people at the far end of the stage, chatting, killing time…you hear distant unrelated music and understand it all forms part of the presentation. When the theater finally darkens and the audience falls silent, there is the sound of breaking glass and Rocío comes into view, wine glass in hand and sipping. “Vinática” is the name of the work, a play on the Spanish words for “wine” and “lunatic”, just in case anyone didn’t get it. Rocío moves to bulerías…the verb “dances” somehow seems inadequate for what she does…with seemingly unconnected, but perfectly calculated movements; just when a pose or posture seems strange, the follow-through a split second later makes crystal clear sense of the whole. A long percussion number of palmas and compás seemed designed for gratuitous applause. And it worked. Singer José Ángel “Carmona” does a fine job singing almost non-stop without guitar, giving life and substance to all the rest. He also plays and accompanies himself on the mandolin. Rocío is exquisite in classic but updated alegrías with her unmistakeable personal touch. The music of guitarist Eduardo Trassierra, whose ability as concert guitarist does not keep him from being a fine accompanist, is lovely. Rocío danced bulerías that will go down in history, anthological, surprising and very flamenco. Her original concepts make you look and listen with new eyes and ears everything you’ve ever known about flamenco up until this moment, and her sensitive fine-tuning allows her to locate the dicey frontier between novelty and nonsense with relative ease. Siguiriyas follows the same line of intelligent modernism. The forms of flamenco don’t limit this artist, they liberate her. An overdose of conceptuality and the insistent darkness (mostly black wardrobe, scant lighting) are, in my opinion negative points that make what would have been an A plus into an A minus for this most recent work of the prolific Rocío Molina. Raperos Canasteros Vocals and dance: Tomasito, Diego Carrasco, Junior Miguez. Guitar: Curro Carrasco. Electric bass: Ignacio Cintado. Percussion: Ané Carrasco. I do hereby declare, without apologies, that “Raperos Canasteros” was the best show of the Nimes festival during the days I attended. Who could have thought such a thing, right? I admit I was considering playing hooky… the mere title of the show, which means “gypsy rappers”, was enough to inspire terror in a flamenco fan of my generation. I’ve always thought it’s senseless to talk about “best” and “worst”. Virtually any performing artist or show that makes it to a reputable public stage has, one way or another, passed through a lengthy process of preparation and carries the implicit desire of the interpreters to communicate; the success of the outcome is a question of personal taste possibly influenced by whether or not the performers had a good night. But this show was quite an eye-opener. Over the course of the week we’d seen elaborate costly works, while these “Raperos Canasteros” had just gotten together the day before in the hotel bar to draw up a loose outline of what they were going to do. Something like “Diego Carrasco opens, a half-hour later Junior comes on to do his bit, then, Tomasito, and to end, all three together”. Compás, knowledge, good taste and the urge to flamenco made everything work like a well-oiled machine with no reservations of any kind. In the first place, if anyone thinks “rap” has no place in flamenco, just check out Lola Flores’ “Tanguillo de las Guapas de Cádiz” or “Catalina Fernández la Lotera”. And certainly Lola did not invent this, but rather she was carrying on an old Cádiz tradition of which the Raperos Canasteros are only the most recent interpreters (Mariana Cornejo, Pericón, Nano de Jerez, El Brillantina and Elena Andújar are others). But more than that, it was the naturalness, the absence of intellectual pretense. These three men, eternal adolescents, hook their safety belts to the compás and let their fertile imaginations flow. Diego Carrasco began with a heartfelt tribute to the much-missed Moraíto, “…qué solito me has dejao, Morao…”, and offered a selection of some of his popular songs. Junior, the one who ran the greatest risk of straying from the path, kept to the flamenco zone with his irresistible tongue-twisters and dancing. And Tomasito…what can I possibly say about “Tommy” as Diego calls him. He is flamenco to the core, fueled by compás at the molecular level, possessing an internal chronometer that is synchronized with the phases of the moon and the galactic cycles of the Milky Way. The final stretch with the three men interacting, and the obvious friendship they share, infected the whole audience with flamenco and was a triumph of this monumental genre, an interpretation as valid and worthy of admiration as Torre singing siguiriyas or Fernanda soleá, two maestros who last night would have been in the front row cheering and applauding. Flamenco Festival Nîmes 2012 – All the information
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