Dialogue
Tierra Encantada—Enchanted Earth, Enchanted Body
Illustration by Dadu Shin
By Sofya Yampolsky
Asking “what is flamenco?” is a lot like asking “what is jazz?” and would take just as long to answer. In brief, I can say that flamenco is the cultural and artistic output and heritage of the Roma people, or gitanos, who lived largely on the margins of Spanish society, both urban and rural, principally in Andalucía in the south of Spain. Since dance does not produce recorded artifacts for historical analysis, most of the theories of the origins of flamenco are assembled from oral histories and by analyzing the extant music, song, and dance to uncover clear influences from other cultures. For instance, there is an obvious visual similarity between flamenco dance and the kathak temple dances of India. Likewise, the contribution of African polyrhythm is fundamental to flamenco musical structure and responsible for its complexity and flexibility.
The Roma people are thought to have left northern India in the eleventh century, and they migrated all over Europe, as far north as Norway. Some settled in the south of Spain, where they lived with African, Moorish, Jewish, and Caribbean peoples.1 Flamenco is a form of folk music arising from this region of mixed influences, and it comprises song (including thousands of “letras,” or verses, which have been passed through an oral tradition), dance (traced only as far back as the mid-nineteenth century), and guitar, which has been influenced at least by Indian, Persian-Arab, and European instrument designs.
Though flamenco only started to leave its ghettos and villages around the turn of the previous century, it is a living tradition that continues to permit and to emit influence internationally. In New Mexico, it began to find a foothold in the 1950s and ’60s with the flamenco school of Clarita Garcia de Aranda in Albuquerque and with María Benítez and Vicente Romero in Santa Fe.
New Mexico is known as “the Land of Enchantment.” It is also home to the National Institute of Flamenco, which grew out of Clarita Garcia de Aranda’s school. For over 40 years, this organization has cultivated the art form of flamenco on the desert soil where the songs of occupation, resistance, hard earth, and exile have also been heard for generations. The root of the Spanish word for “enchanted” (encantada) is cantare—to sing. Enchanted land is land that is enspirited, even haunted, by songs that carry the memories, hopes, and labors of the people, animals, and plants living on and with it. Olives, figs, grapes, hair, rain, dirt, homelessness, hunger, laundry, and love—these are the human, earthy subjects of the songs of flamenco, which find expression in the lyrics of el cante, the sounds of la guitarra, and the gestures of el baile (dance).
Most people are not aware that New Mexico has the only degree in flamenco in the world, and that Albuquerque is the biggest center for flamenco outside of Spain. In fact, in June 2023, the National Institute of Flamenco will produce its 36th Festival Flamenco Albuquerque, which brings the best and foremost flamenco dancers, singers, musicians, and scholars from all over the world every year.2 It is not hard to see why flamenco would thrive in a place that has been shaped for hundreds of years by the experience of tough people fighting to preserve their land, their way of life, and their culture against whichever totalizing invader had newly arrived. The cultural language of New Mexico has been a rich soil in which to plant flamenco.
One of the challenges in writing about flamenco is balancing the need to identify a universal language, which makes flamenco relevant to everybody, without reducing the complexity of the form, the history, and the internal vernacular that are understood by insiders to the culture, to whom more technical terms would be useful or relevant. However, if flamenco was only relevant to insiders, it would fail to have the impact that it does.
Why do people who have no idea about the complexities of this dance or the history of the songs, who don’t even speak Spanish and who may not get the inside jokes and commentaries from performers or know about the lineages of dancing they are building upon—why do these “regular” people come to a performance of flamenco and almost universally experience a strong emotional connection? Regardless of which form of flamenco one sees—whether it’s a small and intimate performance at a tablao, the kind that grew out of what one might call “kitchen flamenco,”3 or the kind of large show that is choreographed and staged in remarkable spectacles with dramatic costuming, set design, lighting, and orchestration4—what unites the insider and the outsider at a show is that it is impossible not to feel a deep engagement with what is happening in front of you.
The best way I can describe seeing flamenco for the first (or even the tenth) time is that you don’t know what you’re looking at, you don’t know why you’re feeling things, you might even be crying, but you certainly can’t explain it. It might take years before you have a sense for what’s happening on the stage; nevertheless, it’s an arresting experience. One could even say it’s cathartic.
Flamenco derives its mesmerizing power not from its ability to be transcendent, but from its ability to make immanent and visible the specifically human embodied experience.
Why does flamenco have this ability to bypass the cognitive operator upstairs and to directly hit our emotional centers? There are specific musical and artistic qualities that contribute to its effect, some of which I will elucidate here; however, the powerful magic of flamenco is not reducible to a few parlor tricks and the powerful branding that says it’s some mystical art handed down for hundreds of years (which, to be fair, it kind of is). I want to suggest here that flamenco derives its mesmerizing power not from its ability to be transcendent, but from its ability to make immanent and visible the specifically human embodied experience.
Emotions live in the body—that’s why we so often use physical terms to describe them: having a “broken heart,” being “sick with worry,” “bursting with pride,” getting “weak in the knees,” and so on. Our bodies are where our humanity resides, because we inhabit a specifically human body from which springs our entire experience of the phenomenal world. David Abram articulates a beautiful philosophy of the senses through the lens of Western phenomenology in his book The Spell of the Sensuous.5 Because flamenco involves the full sensorium of the audience and because its dance gestures are unafraid to reference the body—emanating from it like notes improvised by a jazz musician—a flamenco performance creates a physical, sympathetic, emotional response.
I’d like to highlight a few of the ways flamenco does this:
1. Groundedness and Referring to the Earth
The most important aspect of flamenco that arouses our physical resonance is that of groundedness. Flamenco achieves this by taking an incredible amount of energy and expression and binding it absolutely—like Frodo and the Ring of Power—to the underlying rhythmic structure. No matter how uninhibited the performance, the song, or the guitar flourishes, every single person on the stage is never outside the “compás” (the count) of the particular flamenco palo (song form). The dynamics of syncopating around this underlying rhythm and returning to it creates a satisfying sensation of a cycle that carries you even if you aren’t able to count it yourself.
Another way that flamenco creates a sensation of being grounded is by directing its energy and power down to the ground. In the footwork that is its hallmark, the heels are driven like hammers into the ground, which evokes the precision of hammers used by many Roma blacksmiths in Spain. Even the fastest foot acrobatics maintain their sensation of groundedness because, again, they are absolutely bound by the underlying rhythm. Similarly, turns and jumps are not intended to feel soft, delicate, or aerial. They demonstrate the way that energy is contained through torque (as in turns) and through kinetic potential (as in jumps)—thus, turns emphasize the stop and jumps emphasize the landing.
2. Compás and “Hiding the 1”
It’s worth saying more about the compás in flamenco, since it’s such a central organizing principle for the entire art form. Douglas Goodhart has recently published on the African 12-count rhythm that is hidden in plain sight inside nearly all of the old-time fiddle music of the American upper south.6 The 12-count of African music is not merely an influence but is embedded into the very structure of much of the music that came out of the African diaspora from slavery, such as Cuban and Haitian music. Most of the song forms of flamenco use the 12-count (or 12/8 signature) and vary the emphasis. The 12-count is the most flexible because it allows a great variety of subdivision and endless freedom of syncopation.
One fascinating thing that Douglas pointed out to me years ago is that flamenco music “hides the 1.” The 12-count starts not on the 1, but on the 12. I’ve been thinking about why this might be, and one theory I have is that by starting on the 12, you already produce a condition for syncopation because you allow the musical phrase to start before the beginning. So you have already implied the cycle when you start on the number before the 1. Cycles with specific accents allow us to feel anchored because we can unconsciously rest in knowing what comes next, and when. It’s a little like life, no?
This brings up another vital feature of flamenco that also contributes to the physical blurring of audience and performer, namely, the jaleo (“cheering”). When you find yourself at a good flamenco show, you will hear the audience and the people on stage adding various forms of cheers and yells of encouragement and admiration. The most common word you’d hear is “olé” (or “oooo-lé” or “o-leeé” or “ah-leeé”), which is expressed at moments of an especially physically virtuosic or emotionally potent expression and, importantly, at the conclusion of a musical phrase. If you practice listening to flamenco while counting the 12, eventually you will notice that the audience knows the end of the cycle or verse is coming and emphasizes it with a collective exaltation of “olé.” This release of tension that has been mounting over the several phrases of 12 is a group sigh, a collective breath vocalized, and creates the feeling between the audience and dancers that they have come into a physical sync.
Early in my dance studies, my friend recounted being at a major flamenco festival performance where a couple of professional flamencos were sitting next to her in the audience, playing on their phones while another dazzling artist was on stage. She observed that they weren’t watching the show but suddenly, without even looking up, they would in perfect unity “oleeeé” at exactly the right time in the choreography. That skill comes from a rhythm so wholly internalized that its contours are known as well as we know “shave and a haircut . . . two bits!”
3. The Body—Taking Up Space
Another formal way that flamenco is able to trick us (or guide us) into feeling things is by being unafraid of the body. The flamenco dancer does not disappear into a role, like a ballerina who becomes Giselle or a swan. Flamenco is about becoming more deeply oneself. Flamencos are never afraid of taking up space, and that space is taken not only physically but also energetically. Coyness, playful hiding and revealing, flirtation, expressing gentle emotions, or laughter are all permitted—but you will never witness self-effacement or shyness as an attribute of flamenco.
The marking patterns that dancers use during the verses of a song often refer to the body directly or to other pedestrian gestures of life like picking fruit or gathering your skirt as you wash your laundry in the river. Hips shift in flamenco because hips shift in real life, especially with hard physical labor, or child rearing, or both. Suspension and resistance also play a big role, so that the arms are held around the body as a frame and never loosely. At the same time there is incredible liberty in their expressive power and the softness of the floreo (commonly seen rotating hand flourishes.)
4. Entries and Exits—Engaging Sacred Space
One more important feature I want to highlight has to do with crossing the body/spirit dimension. Like certain African and African-diasporic community dances (the hip hop battle is one example), flamenco uses an entry/exit paradigm. At the beginning of many flamenco performances, you can see a type of walking introductory gesture called a salida. This traveling form of marking the music has a pedestrian quality: it’s proud, it’s how you’d carry yourself on the street, and it says, “Here I am, check this out!” There are other ways to enter that carry a different energy for more somber flamenco palos. And, at a family gathering, you could also just jump up with a “contestación” to say “I am moved by the music to dance, I have been taken over by the spirit”—spirit here being the duende made famous by Federico García Lorca.
But in announcing the individual, the entrada also has a special spiritual task: it carves out a sacred space, much like in a ritual, between the mundane world and the container within which the community can express its deepest emotions and reaffirm a sense of belonging. It’s vulnerable to walk into a circle of peers and relatives and declare your individual humanity, to express your connection to a music and a tradition with your own unique voice. This vulnerability is applauded and encouraged in the safety of the flamenco circle. When a musician is thus enspirited, he or she becomes a channel for divine genius.
The entrada also has a special spiritual task: it carves out a sacred space, much like in a ritual, between the mundane world and the container within which the community can express its deepest emotions and reaffirm a sense of belonging.
Duende might be the spirit of the home, the family, or the earth. I like to think of it as being close to the Socratic “daímon”—the vital energy of unknown origin that inhabits and inspires us. When a musician or a dancer has achieved a level of technical ability and ease, only then is he or she able to become a channel for divine inspiration. Experienced flamencos are not nervous that they will land the turn, that they will finish on time with the compás, or that they will mess up a choreography—and when they are not nervous, we get to be not nervous. They can become a conduit for that creative force, and it can be transmitted directly to us, without any barriers.
The end of an individual flamenco performance is often marked gesturally and musically through a feature called a coletilla (coda) that indicates to everybody (or at least those who know what’s going on) that the piece is ending. I’ve thought about why it so often looks the way that it does—for example, as the dancer exits the center of the stage, she might cross herself repeatedly to the music, or instead she might make repeated gestures that point up to the sky and then down to the ground, or just repeatedly upwards. If we’re looking at the piece ritually, then the coletilla seems to reaffirm the divine-human relationship. You are gesturing to the sky, and then to the earth, declaring that what you have just been a part of is the divine inspiration immanent in earthly form; it is a gesture of gratitude and acknowledgment.
Why does all this matter, ecologically speaking? The reason that you need groundedness in your bodies as a precondition for caring about the earth is because you cannot love the earth “conceptually”—you have to love the earth in its specificity. You love your mountain, that bear, this river. I don’t believe it’s possible to be a “general” animist; rather, you come into a relationship of respect with that bit of earth with which you have a direct relationship. It’s about a real versus an imagined earth.
What we see today is a global condition of dissociation and narcissism. People often think narcissism is about being obsessed with yourself, but Narcissus wasn’t obsessed with himself in the myth, he was obsessed with his reflection. What we do when we collectively dissociate is we create our sense of self not as situated rather miraculously in this specific precarious pile of animated bones, but from the world of reflections and images around us (social media, of course, is a great tool for this dissociation). This world of constructed images and identities is not where our humanity lies; in fact, it allows us to have only a cognitive gaze at the world, as if we are separated from it. Our humanity actually lies in the sensations and emotions that come from being a fleshy human who is able both to feel and to inflict pain, to relate to the pain of others, and to find a meaningful resonance with other enfleshed beings.
Flamenco, in activating the body’s sensual capacity, fosters an intuitive “entering into” the dance or song that reminds us of our fleshy enspirited humanity, which is the very basis of compassion—that is, literally feeling with. But we have more to offer than just compassion. Our place in the woven life of the earth is like one voice in a complex symphony. In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she describes asking her class of freshmen biology students what value humans have for the environment, and to her dismay they couldn’t name a single thing. We all hear and say things like “humans are garbage, the world would be better without us!” She helped me understand that you cannot take care of something to which you feel you do not belong and have nothing to offer.
With this art of flamenco, something intimate and immediate takes place between the dancers, musicians, the audience, and the community, and it says to us, “We, humans, do have something to offer this earth, something of value to express about our place here.” It means no more and no less than the song of a bird, but we must sing it. With this song of belonging begins the real custodianship of the earth.
Notes:
- These groups were also oppressed and exiled when the Moorish caliphate was overthrown by the Christians in the fifteenth century.
- The festival also includes a week of workshop programming for every level of skill. You can find details about the conference and register at ffiabq.org.
- Most people will likely never see “kitchen flamenco,” where everyone from grandmothers to toddlers fully participate in song and dance as an expression of their familial traditions.
- The large shows usually have live accompaniment, but some use recorded music that might, especially in the case of avant garde shows, barely be recognized as “flamenco,” formally speaking.
- David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (Vintage, 1996). His latest book, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Pantheon, 2010), also urges us to connect with the wild intelligence of our bodies.
- Goodhart is an ethnomusicologist, multi-instrumentalist, and friend whom I met in Taos, NM, when he was the guitarist for a small flamenco group there. See Douglas Goodhart, “Scratch Pattern: The African Roots of Old-Time Rhythm,” Old Time News 106 (Summer 2021): 8–11.
Sofya Yampolsky is a graduate student at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM, and holds a master’s degree from The New School for Social Research. She is a student of the Conservatory of Flamenco at the National Institute of Flamenco and has studied in the flamenco dance program at the University of New Mexico.
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