Conceptualising flamenco

Dance
Ring
Esplanade & Garden, Kalkara

Puerto Flamenco’s latest production Ring which was hosted in Bighi as part of the Malta Arts Festival, brought to the fore not only the musicality and aesthetic that is flamenco, but also the socio-political dynamics that reverberate through its form. In an interesting reconceptualisation of the way that flamenco has come to be staged, producers and directors Francesca Grima and Andrej Vujicic built into this year’s production references to the textures of the social context out of which flamenco grew.

The concept of the ring became the visual frame of the performance through the 360˚ rotating stage designed as a mini arena, immediately drawing to mind the ring that denotes the bullfight.

Conceptually many references were direct enough to be taken on a primary aesthetical level. However, as pointed to also in the programme notes, the performance itself was suffused with complexities that sat together in the all encompassing ring. As the artistes wrote in the programme, “In the ‘Ring’ we didn’t want to change flamenco to fit the stage, we changed the stage to fit flamenco… Flamenco becomes the ring that binds us together in our relationship, and at the same time, it is the arena where we can both assert our individualities. It may sound contradictory, but it is how we feel.”

Flamenco in itself is a form that is intertextually laden and laced with social, political and performative tensions that it plays out. Here the artistes laid out the foundations for the two levels of contradictions that they were to be addressing in the performance: the physical, and the symbolical.

Physically they worked at giving form to a “search of back-to-basics authentic expression and artistic sincerity”, to again quote the programme notes. They brought together an explosion of the raw elements that make up flamenco in a frame that was mastered and controlled.

Thus the contradiction of raw flamenco presented in a staged environment that artists have struggled to give definition to was represented through the aesthetic form given to the concept of the ring. This tension allowed them also to infuse the contemporary textural elements that have come to be woven into flamenco without detracting from the completeness of the act of flamenco. Thus contemporary sounds of jazz, saxophone, Oliver Miguel, and cajon, Andrej Vujicic, played alongside the guitar of Eduardo Trassierra and Fyty Carrillo, the cante of Encarnita Anillo and baile of Francesca “La Chica”.

On a symbolical level, the Ring provided for the containment of tensions as duals, cockfights and struggles for ego were played out aesthetically. Union, friendships, marriage merged in and out of the struggles. The aesthetics of rural Andalucia were used primarily to give contextual narrative. The dancer and musicians dialogued, battled and played through the technique and feeling of their own medium expressing the range of emotions that flamenco carries. Fyty Carrillo, perhaps more than any of the other artists, actively worked at engaging the audience in these dynamics. He rotated his posture and eye contact, consciously aware of the 360˚ presence of the audience around him while the ring-shaped stage rotated underneath the artists.

This year’s Ring was conceptually laden. This frame provided for a taut container of the emotional wave that is flamenco with all its traditional elements infused with more contemporary ones. Thus the experience of Puerto Flamenco’s performance this year was again an immersion into the rich texture of the sounds, rhythms and emotions that masters of the art form of flamenco can create and convey.