The passion of flamenco

Foreign aficionados are keeping flamenco alive.

ON a recent morning, Alicia Marquez, a flamenco dancer and professor, was correcting the steps and postures of a class of 10 women, only one of whom was Spanish.

The rest of her class was a mix of Japanese, Chinese, German, English, Danish and Israeli students – all accomplished dancers in their 20s and 30s who have moved to Seville, which was once the heart of Spain’s colonial empire and remains the epicentre of flamenco.

While some struggled to understand Marquez’s Andalusian-accented Spanish, the professor was relying more on showing than telling, raising her arms high above her head to get her students to look up while stamping their feet, as well as clapping forcefully to force them to stick to the rhythm.

Marquez said the proportion of foreign students at her school had climbed to 90% from about 40% a decade ago. With Spain sinking deeper into recession and record joblessness, she said, “Most of my Spanish students simply had to drop out.” Some could no longer afford the tuition, while others could not spare the time because the classes clashed with waiting tables and other jobs that they had to take to stay financially afloat.

“I was lucky to have parents who paid for my training, but fewer and fewer Spanish families are now able to afford such support,” said Marquez, 40.

While flamenco remains a quintessential component of Spanish culture, embedded in the Gypsy community of Andalusia, its economic sustainability relies increasingly on foreigners, who come to Spain both to learn flamenco and to recruit Spaniards to teach and perform overseas.

“The survival of flamenco depends on its internationalisation,” said Jose Ruiz Navarro, a professor of entrepreneurship at Cadiz University and co-author of a study on the economics of flamenco.

The number of foreigners who participated in some kind of flamenco activity while in the southern region of Andalusia, whose capital is Seville, climbed to a million in 2011, from 700,000 a year earlier.

They generated �750mil (RM3bil) for the region’s economy in 2011, up from �550mil (RM2.2bil) according to the latest data collected by Ruiz Navarro, who estimated that Andalusia accounted for four-fifths of Spain’s overall flamenco activity.

Despite the recent growth, he suggested Spain could tap further into this ‘’flamenco tourism,” notably by spreading better the idea that flamenco is modern and evolving.

Flamenco – which is also instrumental and vocal and characterised by its vigorous stamping and clapping – has long had a strong following in some countries, notably Japan. But Marquez noted that the mix of nationalities among the 50 students at her school had expanded significantly; Chinese are among the recent arrivals.

“I’m sure that in a few years we will have as many Chinese as Japanese here,” said Gao Weiquian, as she wiped the sweat off her face after her class. Gao started learning flamenco only last year, after moving from China to Spain to complete a doctorate in Hispanic literature. She now spends �210 (RM850) a month on tuition at two different flamenco schools.

Macarena Martin Villanueva, the one Spaniard in Marquez’s class, said she found it enriching to study alongside foreigners like Gao. But she lamented the limited interest in flamenco among her Spanish friends.

“I used to consider flamenco to be purely Andalusian, but I’ve come to realise that an Australian or a Japanese can show more enthusiasm for flamenco than most people here,” she said.

“For a foreigner, flamenco is in part exciting because it feels exotic, while most of my childhood friends have grown up surrounded by flamenco music and don’t particularly want to dance it.”

Still, she said, “Money is a real problem because once you get hooked on flamenco, it quickly gets expensive.”

In early January, for the traditional Spanish gift-giving feast of Epiphany, her father gave her a new pair of flamenco shoes, which cost about �180 (RM726). “Without the help of my parents, this would just be impossible,” Martin Villanueva said.

Meanwhile, more of Spain’s flamenco artiste and teachers are going abroad. Blanca Perdiguer, a flamenco teacher based in Seville, has been spending about five months a year in Moscow and Prague since 2008, when the financial crisis started and burst Spain’s property bubble.

“There’s a real exodus of Spanish flamenco teachers,” Perdiguer said. In both Moscow and Prague, she has been earning about �3,000 (RM12,000) a month, almost triple her wages in Seville, as well as having her lodging and travel expenses covered by the dance schools that employ her. She is considering making Prague her permanent residence.

When abroad, Perdiguer has relied on local interpreters to help her teach “highly motivated” students. “I now believe that a Russian can learn just as well as an Andalusian, because although flamenco isn’t part of Russian culture, music and dancing certainly are,” she said. Many of her Russian students, she suggested, embraced flamenco “as an escape from what can be a pretty strict and cold life routine.”

Men also perform flamenco, but most foreigners dancing flamenco are women, particularly among the large contingent of Japanese in Seville, many of whom first discovered flamenco thanks to pioneering Japanese flamenco artiste like Yoko Komatsubara and Shoji Kojima, who travelled to Spain in the 1960s to learn flamenco before opening their own flamenco academies and dance companies in Japan. Seven years ago, Kaori Taniguchi left her human resources job in Osaka to move to Seville, which she called “the real mecca of flamenco.” She spent six years on a student visa, before switching last year to a Spanish work visa after her teacher, Marquez, offered her a job as an administrator to help her cope with the rising inflow of foreign students. Taniguchi speaks Japanese, Spanish and English.

“There are a lot of single women in Japan who have the money and want to get away from the stress and rigidity of Japanese life,” Taniguchi said. “I started flamenco as a hobby, but it also made me think about whether I could ever be happy staying in Japan and working 14 hours a day.”

But even as more foreigners learn flamenco, few have so far managed to break into a professional circle heavily dominated by the Gypsy community. The successful ones have generally relocated to Spain, like Chloe Brule, a Canadian who trained as a ballet dancer in Montreal but then moved to Seville to form a partnership with Marco Vargas, a Seville-born Gypsy.

“You can learn flamenco anywhere, but Andalusia is a rite of passage if you want to live it like the ritual that it is,” said Aurora Limburg, the French-Belgian international manager of Brule and Vargas, who is also based in Seville.

Yinka Graves, a British dancer of Ghanaian and Jamaican descent and who has been living in Seville since January, said that “as a black person, I can understand the sentiment within the Gypsy community that we are people who have come to hijack their culture.”

Graves has performed flamenco at several venues in Spain as well as in Britain, including Ronnie Scott’s, a London jazz club. She compared her situation to that of a musician “who can sing the blues but cannot pretend to have come from the cotton fields.” Still, given that flamenco was in itself a fusion of cultures, she argued there was no reason why more foreign flamenco artists could not eventually take centre stage.

“It takes a huge amount of determination to come from the outside and learn something that is not natural to one’s community, but that certainly shouldn’t stop me from being able to interpret flamenco in a way that really touches the audience,” Graves said. “Flamenco is about feelings, not about blood.” – IHT