Dancing to a different tune
Journalist Ian Sinclair has worked in war zones and high-pressure newsrooms. He tells Richard Betts how he’s forging a new career as a flamenco musician.
One of the most electrifying nights of music I’ve ever experienced was in a bar called La Carboneria, in Seville, Spain. La Carboneria is where the locals go to hear flamenco, the folk music and dance of Andalusia in the country’s south. The room had no stage, instead three youngish men sat in a corner, one a singer, one a dancer, the other a nimblefingered guitarist. From nowhere an older man, looking to be in his mid-70s, rose before the crowd and started to sing.
Arms outstretched, he turned to members of the audience one by one, declaiming, imploring, pleading. His voice wavering just on the edge of tonality, he was the embodiment of what the Spanish call duende, an almost hypnotic magnetism that touches the soul. Journalist Ian Sinclair knows duende. He’s been travelling to Spain since the 1970s and playing flamenco guitar almost as long. He’s done plenty of other things too, of course. As a foreign correspondent for TVNZ he was sent to New York after 9/11 and went to the front line in Afghanistan; during the Iraq war he learnt to keep nerve gas medication in his cupboard.
“If we were attacked we had 20 seconds to decide to hit ourselves with an autoinjector that might kill us anyway,” he says.
The stakes are lower these days. Sinclair is stepping back from journalism and pursuing his love of flamenco.
“I’ve been working 40 years and the longest I’ve ever had off is six weeks,” he says. “It’s time I started thinking about doing other things.”
The first of those “other things” is a North Island tour, playing with a group of top Spanish flamenco musicians, led by the charismatic dancer Isabel Rivera Cuenca.
Rivera Cuenca is the real deal. She was born in Catalonia of Andalusian stock. Like many in the middle part of last century, her family drifted north to Barcelona, where they founded a flamenco cultural centre.
“I heard flamenco while I was in my mother’s belly,” she says. “I heard it when I was a child and I heard it when I was sleeping, because I was behind the stage, so flamenco is something that came through my skin.”
You can see it when she dances, twisting and swirling, her fingers mapping elegant patterns in the air like a fan made flesh and blood. Flamenco rhythms are famously complex but, Rivera Cuenca admits, she doesn’t need to count the beat, she just feels it. When describing flamenco, she talks a lot about feeling, never technique.
“When I practise I don’t have a mirror, because I want to do what I’m feeling. For me it’s what you feel that’s important, and then that is expressed through movement.”
Although she describes herself as a traditionalist, Rivera Cuenca is open to others’ innovations.
“Art is alive and artists need to always question themselves, because if you question yourself, you are developing. We can do something different but first you need the roots, because they give you a place to come home to.”
The roots of flamenco are a point of contestation, Spain’s own pavlova. Travel through the country, particularly Andalucia, and everyone claims their town to be the One True Source. Sevillians say flamenco is theirs; people from the Sevillian suburb of Triana claim only theirs is the real flamenco. Head to Cadiz and you’ll be told you are in flamenco’s proper home.
As far as Rivera Cuenca is concerned, flamenco is a national artform, not regional, and it has been adapted over time in response to specific situations. “For example,” she says, “in the 50s and 60s life was brutal because of the dictator [General Francisco Franco], and people used flamenco to express their feelings.”
Sinclair has felt that urge; he describes it as a tug at his sleeve. On his first trip to Spain, his experience of the country under Franco influenced his decision to become a journalist.
“I was a music writer but not a professional — writing for the university newspaper and things like that,” he recalls. “When I went to Spain and saw how things really were, I realised I wanted to do hard news, I wanted to chase stories. So when I got back to New Zealand, I went to journalism school.”
He never shook off the sleeve tug of flamenco, however. He had a guitar with him while he worked overseas and since being back he’s played regularly at Cafe one2one on Ponsonby Rd.
Performing with a professional troupe is different to those more intimate gigs but he says there are similarities with his previous work.
“I think flamenco singers are like TV presenters and the guitarists are like reporters.”
Is Sinclair suggesting guitarists do all the work while the one up front takes all the plaudits?
“It’s a bit like that,” he says, laughing.