¡Asi es! --- I bite the buttons off my shirt!

I went to the Flamenco Rouge performance at the Music and Beyond Festival with expectations of being highly entertained. I didn't expect to get so much education at this event. It was an audio-visual production, called Corrientes, the Spanish word for currents, about the Power of the Sea and its symbolism in Spanish culture and social history, about ebb and flow in people's lives. On a screen behind the stage images were projected, photos of the sea and the vessels on it, of ports and harbours, of the Spanish people, reproductions of famous Spanish paintings and clips from poems in Spanish, several of these by Neruda or by Lorca (extracts from his Seawater Ballad for example, La balada del agua del mar). Some of the images seemed to fit the music and dance we were witnessing; others didn't --- I'll come to that later.

At the start the performers processed in from the behind the audience, clapping rhythmically, then stamping. Flamenco Rouge is a group from Halifax, NS, including a newly recruited drummer who wore a black outfit and black shoes with long, pointed toes and bright red socks. The two guitarists wore scarlet shirts, the ladies wearing a variety of dresses, veils and shawls. They didn't carry fans, but large fans and extra shawls were spread out on boards in front of the stage. They took their seats in a row behind the dance platform, the drummer holding his vertical, lute shaped drum between his knees. He is one of the toque, the instrumentalists. The charismatic female leader of the troupe, Brenley Heaver, takes the cante part, singing soulfully (and very well) in each number, through a microphone, and the other three ladies are the bailarinas, the dancers. Ms. Heaver, who I'm surprised to learn is not Spanish after all, is married to the lead guitarist, Matt Martin, as she told us during this show, admitting that she sings one of these songs, the one called Allegrias, to their baby son as a lullaby. All the participants become palmeros at times, clapping a rhythm with their palmas (palms of their hands). Castanets occasionally come into it too, but not in every instance.

The troupe performs music and dances from both sides of the Atlantic, including some from South America, but mostly from Spain. This is a gypsy art form, apparently, now with UNESCO heritage status. Some old black and white photos on the screen showed scruffy people dancing or otherwise joining in with spontaneous outbursts of flamenco in the streets or at the docksides. It bears a resemblance to Portuguese fada, especially at its "dark, pensive moments", as Ms. Heaver put it, and in its Moorish ornamentation. We heard tarantas, that had elements of jazz or blues, with a set sequence of harmonies and soloists in those numbers. The music sets the mood, the dance holds the audience's attention. I confess I was rather taken aback by the age of the dancers who I was prejudicially expecting to be very young and slim (they aren't), but they do know how to move and what to do with their hands and feet. Their fingers waggle or flutter; their noisy heels stamp or kick the long trains of their dresses aside. Often, I was reminded of peacocks. Near the beginning, one of these ladies strutted in wearing a dramatic black veil and trailing a long dress with flounces in peacock blue. The train can be thrown over a dancer's arm too; it seems to me a miracle that she doesn't trip over it.

There are stories behind each song and dance, often, so we were told, with an undercurrent of rage or "torment in the heart". The dresses were in dramatic colours, black, bright pink or orange, bright red, dazzling white. I assume that some of the traditional singing and the words would have come from men, since one of the passionate lines Ms. Heaver spoke of means "I bite the buttons off my shirt!" I doubt if a woman would do that. As one lady dances to the music, the more passive members of the cast shout their approval, as is traditional, calling out ¡Eso es! or ¡Asi es! --- that's how it is, i.e. "I feel what you feel!" One song was a sort of howl to the moon, with fingers clicking and shouts of ¡Olé!

For the second half of the performance the ladies wore different clothes, their shawls more in evidence, especially in the fandango where the shawl, or mantón, was swirled around her head and body in order "to communicate feelings". La barca de mis amores gave us an example of "flamenco sauciness". In the lyrics, the lovers in the story tear at each other's hair in a fury. No understatement in this culture! The words of some of the songs are very poetic, perhaps especially in Allegrias, the quasi-lullaby mentioned above, that tells of the joy and sorrow of coming home or leaving home and starts on the guitar in a minor key. "Waves play with the shore like a dancing child." On the screen, a Lorca quotation was projected:

The sea smiles from far off 

Teeth of foam 

Lips of sky ...

It is a shame to end this blog post on a sour note, but I feel I must say that some of the images in the slide show seemed inappropriately distracting, in the context. These were the reproductions of Goya's absolutely horrific nightmare etchings and civil war paintings. I have seen them before. They are so awful that I could not bear to look up at times and they haunted and depressed me afterwards. To me they didn't seem to go with the finger clicking, hand slapping, heel kicking sauciness of the dancing, even though the artistic director may have felt that they befitted the darkness behind the songs. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe it is all connected. Food for thought.