FLAMENCO BLACK DANCE AND MUSIC CONCERT
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Back to Atlanta Flamenco Festival Line-up >>
FLAMENCO BLACK
November 11, 2023
Concerts at 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.
Pre-show lectures by K. Meira Goldberg, flamenco dancer, historian, and author of Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco
2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Emory University Performing Arts Studio
1804 N Decatur Rd, Atlanta, GA 30322
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Featuring Yinka Esi Graves, flamenco dance
Alfonso Cid, flamenco vocals and flute
Pepele Méndez, flamenco vocals and percussion
Antonio Arrebola, flamenco percussion
Guillermo Guillén, flamenco guitar
Moussa Diabate, African drumming
CLICK FOR TICKETS TO FLAMENCO BLACK —
A Través proudly presents Flamenco Black during the Atlanta Flamenco Festival. After debuting in Dallas in 2023, this special production will travel to Atlanta, where artists will perform two concerts on November 11, 2023, at Emory University Performing Arts Studio. The concerts feature live flamenco music and singing, as well as choreography by international dancers Yinka Esi Graves, Antonio Arrebola and Artistic Director and Producer Delilah Buitròn Arrebola.
Flamenco Black combines the art of flamenco, contemporary dance, and traditions of the African Diaspora. Dances reflect African influences on flamenco in the New World. This important and little-known aspect of flamenco demonstrates – on two sides of the Atlantic Ocean – ways in which communities are connected across geography and history. It is a surprising element of flamenco, an art form that for many is synonymous with Spanish culture and its Moorish and Romani influences.
The idea for Flamenco Black came from a child’s question. Delilah Arrebola, Director of the Flame Foundation, which presents flamenco arts in Dallas, explains that her son, who is Black and Hispanic-American, asked why he never saw anyone who looked like him on the flamenco stage. He began dancing flamenco as a young child and has always been surrounded by flamenco artists, including his parents and their Spanish colleagues. Arrebola set out to address her son’s question, and in the process found a world of African influences on flamenco that is exciting because of the immediate answers it brings and the possibilities for expression that it offers for the future. Her discoveries have led to the collaboration among the principal artists, musicians, and company dancers who are bringing this production to the stage.
Flamenco has roots in the African Diaspora, which moved music and dance between the continent of Africa, the places that we now call North and South America, and Spain for hundreds of years. Scholars have connected specific flamenco movements, musical sounds, and communal behaviors to specific traditions of African peoples in the New World. More information about the African influences on flamenco is coming to light, at the same time that the erasure of the history of slavery in Spain is getting attention in Europe. The same interplay of influences is relevant in the southern U.S.A., because similar African influences are present in jazz, hip-hop, and the blues. Understanding how a “Spanish” and “European” art form is part of the African Diaspora, shows how no single artistic expression is born in a single place, but rather emerges through the exchange of ideas that happens when communities come together.
The use of contemporary dance in Flamenco Black is an emerging addition to flamenco styles, one that is now presented frequently in major theaters and festivals in Spain and Europe. Although traditional flamenco is still alive in Spain, the art form has changed as artists pushed the movement and music through new boundaries over decades, based on experimentation and influences that arrive through technology and travel. Artists create new song lyrics, new sounds for the guitar, introduce additional instruments, and even question what to wear on stage as they showcase perspectives of their own generations, farther and farther from flamenco’s origins as its own art form in the mid-1800s. As these changes arrive, few existing styles are abandoned, creating a wide range in the esthetic of flamenco arts. Showing flamenco as part of contemporary dance is important, because it makes flamenco relevant in many artistic circles. It demonstrates how dancers and musicians break apart and reconstruct the components of flamenco to express issues that are important to our lives in the 21st century. Thus, flamenco exists not only in its tight-knit circles of artists and cabales (well-informed flamenco fans), but also thrives in the world of art outside of those boundaries, where dancers and musicians are recognized as modern creatives who are tackling problems through the arts. Specifically, using flamenco with contemporary dance, site-specific performance, and innovative musical changes, including electronic instrumentation and new song lyrics, flamenco artists are starting conversations for audiences about economic crisis, feminism, racism, and accessibility.
Scholarly research now includes the roots of flamenco in the place once called the New World. For example, a set of songs and dances called ida y vuelta, were said to have been created after flamenco formed, with influences of songs and dances of Latin America. (Ida y vuelta is a phrase in Spanish that refers to a round trip, as to say the songs developed when flamenco left Spain, went to Latin America, and then returned to Spain with new, Latino influences.) The repertoire of ida y vuelta was considered flamenco ‘lite’ and separate, from the core songs and dances of the art form. However, songs of ida y vuelta were among the first recordings made by Thomas Edison starting in the late 1800s. While there were also other flamenco songs on the recordings, those of ida y vuelta were strongly represented and were sung by some of the prominent artists of the time. Separately, experts mapped much of the flamenco canon to one of the songs of the ida y vuelta group – the guajira. It is one of the very songs on Edison’s recordings. The research shows how the song’s rhythm influenced much of what we now enjoy in flamenco. More scholars have been publishing work that explains how music and dance traditions of the New World influenced the early days of flamenco. Thus, the songs and dances that decades ago were said to have a minor presence in flamenco are actually a major part of the origin story of the rhythms, melodies, and movements that gave rise to the art form as people and their traditions mixed across the Atlantic.
Flamenco Black will be provocative because most people know about the Moorish and Romani influences of flamenco, but not the African roots. A Través hopes the surprises in this performance will be educational while entertaining and that they can help individuals find common ground through (a través de) the arts.