From the dance of barefoot tradesmen to the big stage: How flamenco miraculously gained Spanish recognition

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Flamenco is a musical and dance style that Spain considers to be its national treasure. It is also a visiting card of the country. Even those who do not know the name of the dance, seeing the baylaor - flamenco performers - instantly associate it with Spain. But flamenco almost died as a style and for a long time received only contempt from the Spaniards. They managed to save him almost by a miracle.

Flammen means "to blaze"

There are many speculations about how the word "flamenco" came into being. The most romantic thing associates it with the German word "flammen", flaming. Why German? Because it allegedly came with the gypsies from Flanders, indicating that in the dance they look like a flame.

Another theory, more realistic, also ties together gypsies, Flanders and the word "flamenco". The earliest mention of the word "flamenco" in literature refers not to dance, but to a knife of Flanders work. With such knives, it was as if German gypsies had once come to Spain.

In any case, until the nineteenth century, the word "flamenco" was not associated with either dances or songs, although in one way or another it was attributed to the gypsies. Perhaps the word stuck to the dance, because it was performed mainly by gypsies - at least for money. Nowadays, any Spaniard can dance at least a little.

Music that has absorbed the history of the country

Since flamenco music was firmly associated with the gypsies of Andalusia, there was a time when it was assumed that its origins should be sought in the far east, in India. However, most likely, these tunes did not come with the gypsies together. In flamenco (dance, song and music), one can find both Indian dance positions and Arabic, Jewish, indigenous Pyrenean melodies, motives, movements and possibly archaic plots.

Sometimes in certain movements of the dancers they see the reflections of the very ritual games with the bull, which were practiced on the entire northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea and from which bullfighting originated. In any case, literally all the peoples who shaped the history and culture of Spain were noted in flamenco. The Gypsies, most likely, became the people who gathered different traditions together and processed the result in their own way.

Flamenco was not always performed openly, in squares or in cafes. This became possible only when the persecution of Roma stopped in Europe; before that, passionate lovers of style themselves went up to the gypsy cave houses in the mountains, or they could ask to sing and play the vendors who looked into the courtyard with trifles.

With the appearance on the stage of scenes in the cafe, the appearance of shot with heels is associated, which now seems to be something inseparable from flamenco. Performers, in order to keep the attention of the public, had to first get hold of it somehow. The clatter of heels on the stage, which looked like a huge wooden resonator, did an excellent job of this task. Over time, the fraction became more and more whimsical, a certain manner of its execution developed.

The appearance of flamenco on the stage also contributed to the fact that playing the castanets almost ceased to be used - after all, now every dancer had an orchestra at his disposal. The times when the peddler, having received the money, set aside the goods, took out the castanets and transformed into a dancer, are a thing of the past.

But, although the gypsies in the cafe constantly found interested spectators, there were few ardent connoisseurs. In general, flamenco has long been considered low-profile restaurant music, to which it is good to cry drunk, and at the beginning of the twentieth century it began to be supplanted by more fashionable genres: Argentine tango and jazz. The unique style honed over the decades was almost endangered, at least for the Spanish scene for sure.

What one person can do

One of the main connoisseurs of flamenco, who made every effort to ensure that the Spaniards recognized flamenco as their unique genre, an important part of their culture, was the great poet Federico García Lorca. He not only created a cycle of poems completely devoted to the styles of flamenco, and studied the features of these styles, but also traveled around the country with lectures explaining to listeners the uniqueness of flamenco, its significance for the country and its culture. Lorca himself willingly visited gypsy caves and was well acquainted not only with the restaurant version of flamenco.

It was Lorca who introduced the idea that flamenco is patronized by three principles: the muse, the angel and the duende (spirit, which can also be perceived as a "devil" - and this sometimes causes accusations of the non-Christian spirit of the genre).

To illustrate the duende, Lorca told the following story: “Once the Andalusian singer Pastor Pavon, Girl with Crests, a gloomy Spanish spirit with a fantasy to match Goya or Raphael El Gallo, sang in one of the taverns in Cadiz. She played with her dark voice, mossy, shimmering, melting like tin, wrapped him in locks of hair, bathed him in Manzanilla, led him into the distant wilderness. And it's all in vain. There were silence around …

And then the Girl with the Crests jumped up, wild as an ancient mourner, drank a glass of fiery casaglia in one gulp and sang, with a scorched throat, without breath, without a voice, without anything, but … with a duende. She knocked out all the support from the song in order to make way for the violent, burning duende, brother of the samum, and he forced the audience to tear off their clothes, as the Antillean blacks tear them in a trance in front of the image of Saint Barbara. The girl with the crests tore off her voice, for she knew: these judges do not need a form, but her nerve, pure music - an etherealness born to roar. She sacrificed her gift and skill - having removed the muse, defenseless, she waited for the duende, begging to make her happy with a duel. And how she sang! The voice was no longer playing - it was pouring out a stream of blood, genuine, like the pain itself …"

Although Lorca was soon killed by gendarmes, and the Spanish government had very little opinion about everything he did, and even banned his books for a long time, he managed to influence the minds of the people. One way or another, flamenco turned out to be for a long time and is largely associated with his name. From his poems they made songs in the flamenco genre, his plays are staged with flamenco dance inserts. If a film is made about flamenco as a dance or a song, Lorca will be the background of this film, even if his name is never mentioned.

He managed to "legalize" flamenco so much that over the past few decades, many Spaniards have come to the genre who have nothing to do with gypsies in terms of their origin, and in 2010 UNESCO gave flamenco the status of a World Heritage Site. It comes to the point that the same category of nationalists that once shouted that flamenco polluted Spanish culture is now trying to deny its connection with the gypsies - after all, this is a beautiful, pure Spanish genre.

Flamenco has influenced all the cultures of Spain, including the Jewish one. Proof of this best voice of Israel: sensual video for the song by Yasmin Levy, in which, as in all songs, flamenco motives are heard.