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Festival Vaivenes Flamencos |
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It’s only been four nights and already you have the feeling of attending a well-established festival. The quality of the shows, the well-balanced program and the way it’s distributed over the week, prepare you mentally to enjoy the rest of the festival with equal enthusiasm. Sometimes long festivals in other large cities offer many shows with dubious content, many of which are never again performed. The works and groups coming to Alcalá are varied and of high quality, and are attracting a diverse audience anxious to see the shape of flamenco to come (which in fact is already here). Text: Juan Diego Martín Cabeza LA MAGIA DEL FLAMENCO ALEGRE Playwright: Jorge Barroso “Bifu” A magical night. Flamenco, theater, circus, all well-done…you know it’s a fine piece of work because when you leave, you want to tell everyone to go see it: parents, children, programmers, politicians, critics, lawyers…it’s that good. Let’s hope Varuma is able to travel with their Malgama to show the theatrical possibilities of current flamenco, and we also hope many children hear flamenco for the first time via this group. There’s magic, lots of magic, and flamenco is always somewhere on stage, quite at home. Nothing that takes place is foreign to flamenco because everything is connected by invisible threads, like the long train of the bata de cola used by the trapeze artist, or the polkadots from the dress with juggler’s balls. Flamenco flows freely, beautifully and truly. Choni reveals herself to be a sort of Alice in Wonderland in the middle of a world made to size. At last, flamenco which doesn’t discriminate against anyone, conceived from the most “jondo” perspective, and nevertheless accessible to both adults and children.
Another convincing theatrical detail is the pacing of entrances and exits, the transitions between scenes. Noteworthy is the music, both the guitar of Raúl Cantizano and the electronic mixes that play an important role and add a great deal to the action, especially in the precise and coherent use of compás. Good lighting integrated into the space converts the walls of the castle, and the night, into essential elements of the whole. Flamenco without prejudices, false dogma or baroque theories…it must be a kind of flamenco like this, light and agile, where compás is carried in the held breath of the juggler’s balls upon boxes, where the petenera, that feared object of the superstitious, forms part of the clown’s joke (free at last!); where guajira is a melody that reminds us of magicians’ acts, where you don’t know if you’re watching a dancer or a trapeze artist in a dance of reflections with the moon as backdrop.
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