Flurry, fury and thrilling flamenco
The guitarist began with a slow melody to set the tone and tempo. I was in Cordoba, ready and eager to be swept away by flamenco’s thrilling beat. I was at a tablao, an amateur ‘commercial spectacle’, and a dimly-lit audience sat around eight small tables that would soon be in interactive range of the stage.
As everyone clapped along to the rhythm, an impatient heckler – in between coughing bouts – yelled: ‘Get on with it… we’ve come for the dancing.’ As the guitar rhythm escalated, the singer found his moment to wander through the audience and out of the room to use the lavatory.
The finale involved the female dancer staring straight out at me, or so it seemed, and reducing her flurry and fury to a calming anti-climax as though, knowing she had the audience in the palms of her hands, she had decided to send the whole show up.
Two nights later was a completely different story: in Granada at a peña in the Albaicin district. Peñas are private ‘social clubs’, similar to old-style music halls
The locals had come to welcome back one of their own, Irene Rueda, a dancer who had hit the big time on the world’s flamenco stages.
And she lost no time in getting fully immersed. Her arms were held aloft and her head thrown defiantly back. Then she curved her arms round her body, bent her elbow and hammered her heels remorselessly home into the floorboards.
Irene lost the flower in her hair the moment she chucked away her tasselled shawl and unleashed the raw reality of the dance.
It commanded as well as demanded my attention.