Lame reworking of flamenco won’t win many new fans

WHY is it that everyone wants to reinvent everything these days? Or reimagine? Or re-envisage? Or re-this? Or re-that? The latest victim is flamenco, the dark, burning and, let’s face it, macho celebration of music and dance that is the very beating heart of Andalusia – alongside bullfighting, sherry, magnificent horses and almost all else that is usually thought of as typically Spanish. The latest guilty party is Sevillan dancer and choreographer Maria Pages, who has decided to ‘rescue’ Carmen from Bizet’s misogyny. In so doing, she has apparently also decided to redesign the very psyche of flamenco – from a female perspective. In effect, she has produced feminist flamenco. Feminist flamenco? She’s having a laugh. Right? Wrong. She’s deadly serious, as you can tell from programme notes that inform us: ‘She aspires to become the voice of a woman who rises up strongly before us to express the realities that confront women and the contexts in which they live.’ That could have come from the class notes of any Left-wing lecturer or the minutes of any radical, right-on student council of the past 50-odd years. Yo Carmen begins well enough, with a frenzy of fans and the glorious strains of Bizet. But it soon descends into self-conscious self-indulgence in an attempt to hybridise flamenco with all manner of intercontinental influences. It’s not all bad. Pages’ all-female troupe of dancers are easily the best thing about it. It may be a brave thing for a woman of a certain age whose best days are not ahead of her to surround herself with all these younger, slimmer models. But it may not be a wise one. The music is perfectly well performed, but where was the fire and fury, the raw, dark excitement? The thing that disappointed me most was the hand-clapping. In the dark, smoky basement bars of Cadiz and Seville, pistol-crack hand claps cut through the music to provide a sound and an atmosphere like no other. Here, the hand-clapping, frankly, was more akin to polite applause. To be fair, the audience seemed divided on Yo Carmen. Some, such as myself, failed to warm to it at all. Others almost went into a frenzy of ecstasy. Not that a whirling dervish or two would have looked entirely out of place if this had wandered onstage and joined in this hugely disappointing production. The moral of the tale? If it ain’t broke, don’t reinvent it.