Music: Primal movement

A response to the Spanish Inquisition’s oppression, flamenco expresses the soul of a nation

By Sarah Linn

As one aficionado says, flamenco is a primal scream. It’s wild and ancient, an art form crafted during the Spanish Inquisition by the country’s outcasts: gypsies, Jews, Moors and Muslims. It’s the soul of Andalusia, the voice of an entire nation.

“Why (flamenco) exists is why any minority art form exists—which is as a rebel song, a deep cry to be whoever you are,” explained Martín Santangelo, artistic director, choreographer and cofounder of the Madrid-based Noche Flamenca.

Featuring lead dancer Soledad Barrio, the performance group promises flamenco without tricks or gimmicks at its San Luis Obispo concert tonight.

“It’s the kind of company that all the people who love flamenco want to be in,” said Santangelo.

Impassioned style

As fans of the Spanish performance style know, flamenco features rapid, fluid guitar playing, heart-piercing vocals, impassioned dancing and a flurry of rhythmically pounding hands and feet.

Inspiration is rooted in several subcultures, including Spain’s Sephardic Jews, gypsies, and Arab groups.

“It’s interesting. The further you go backward, the more modern it seems,” Santangelo said about flamenco.

Among the highlights of tonight’s concert are two new dance solos and two new pieces choreographed for the entire company. “La Mujer Del Mar” draws its inspiration from a play by Henrik Ibsen, “The Lady from the Sea.”

“What attracted me to the Ibsen piece is, he’s looking for the freedom of the individual,” explained Santangelo, adding that the same idea exists in flamenco. “To capture that freedom, he feels we have to break the institutions, the ideals, of society.”

Santangelo created the other piece, “Esta Noche No Es Mi Dia” (Tonight’s Not My Day), as a tribute to a longtime member of Noche Flamenca, Antonio Vizarraga. The singer passed away last year.

“He inspired me a tremendous amount as an artist and a person,” the choreographer said, describing “Esta Noche” as “a kiss goodbye” to Vizarraga.

Santangelo was just four years old when he got his first taste of flamenco from his parents’ talented friends. He took up flamenco dancing as a calling at age 15 and met his future wife, Madrid-born Soledad Barrio, when they were members of separate companies.

“She’s a once-in-a-lifetime dancer,” her husband said.

The two formed Noche Flamenca in 1993. Today the roster includes Barrio, five other dancers, three singers and six guitarists—many of whom hail from the birthplace of flamenco in southern Spain. They’re on the road six or seven months out of the year, a schedule the director describes as “exhausting, exhausting, exhausting.”

‘The dancer shouldn’t think’

Although Barrio’s dancing garners plenty of press — The New York Times hailed her as a passionate performer “who can make a believer out of the most jaded spectator” —she and the rest of the company strive to keep the focus on flamenco itself, Santangelo said.

“What’s killing and taking the life out of flamenco is the protagonism that the dancer has captured in the last 50, 60 years,” he said, adding that modern flamenco groups falter by placing more attention on the foot-stomping, castanet-clicking dancers than the music.

“(Flamenco) is about expressing what the singer is singing and what the guitar player is playing,” Santangelo said. “The dancer shouldn’t think. The dancer should improvise.”