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SPECIAL BIENAL DE FLAMENCO DE SEVILLA 2008 Text: Estela Zatania Dance: Rafael Carrasco, Ricardo López, José Maldonado, Pedro Córdoba, David Corla. Piano: Chico Valdivia. Cello: José Luís López. Guitar: Jesús Torres, Juan Antonio Suárez ‘Canito’. Cante: Antonio Campos, La Tremendita, Manuel Gago. Coreography: Rafaela Carrasco and company. A beautiful drawing that appears on the front of the program is more eloquent than any comment of mine. It’s Seville dancer Rafaela Carrasco dressed and posed as in the most famous photograph that has come down to us of Encarnación López Júlvez “Argentinita” (1895-1945). But with one noticeable difference that immediately catches your attention. Instead of the radiant wall-to-wall smile, the chin raised high and the clear-eyed gaze, Rafaela’s face is covered with dark foreboding, like the faces of people you see on the news who have survived terrible situations and are not able to regain their optimism.
Assuming the image was selected by the dancer herself, I have to accept that the unrelenting coldness her dancing communicates to me, is precisely what she is trying to cultivate and wishes to communicate. What’s not clear is why she chooses this approach to a genre characterized by unbridled emotion and a dynamic philosophy that energetically revels in life’s pleasure and pain. Rafaela Carrasco’s dancing, more than cold, impresses me as “northern”. Aside from this, I perceive the annoying message that the dancer is trying to prove she’s earned the right to modify flamenco because she’s studied its past. But rather looking to her own past, she goes much further back, to that of her grandparents, to the songs of Lorca and Argentinita which were already relics in the nineteen-sixties when I heard them for the first time. A cordobés hat, a cheesy design on the floor, the men’s red shoes and a silver lamé bata de cola with the dreaded polkadots young people eschew, make up a visual aesthetic that seems intended to show that maybe the past isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.
As is typical of Rafaela Carrasco, the singers are put to work for other things than cante. Antonio Campos is made to sing Anda Jaleo to petenera (not a joke), and Tremendita appears again and again singing the Lorca/Argentinita songs, musically modified, with a strange falsetto voice that is not hers; I even suspected there might have been the intention to ridicule the music. Once again, scant illumination. Zero communication between the dance and the musicians who seldom glance away from their instruments. The tight leather pant-suit Rafaela uses for several dances, obsessively repeated heelwook, the tight little bun at the top of her head, the permanently shrugged shoulders of modern dance… For Rafaela Carrasco, flamenco is an enemy to overcome. Four male dancers who go beyond mere competence dance sevillanas in bata de cola…so what….but the long dresses are full of frilly silver ruffles, and even so, the men maintain their virile flamenconess. They are permitted to display their talents in other dances as well, affording the only relief in a show that is more depressing than invigorating.
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XV BIENAL DE FLAMENCO DE SEVILLA
