The emergence of the dancer Manuela Carrasco (Seville, 65 years old) on the flamenco scene shook, due to her overwhelming force, the foundations of the most ethnic dance. The precarious stage supports of the Andalusian festivals of the late seventies, in which she began to shine, were insufficient to contain the commotion of feet that seemed supernatural.
Over time, the energy of the youth was tempered to welcome stages of tablaos and knowledge, among which Manuela recognizes the group Los Bolecos—composed of Farruco, Matilde Coral and Rafael El Negro—that would enrich her language. Her strength and temperament would transmute, over time, into slower movements, as she accessed spaces more in line with her growing charisma, theaters in which she would exhibit twenty shows that have remained for the memory of her. José Luis Ortiz Nuevo, one of the best exegetes of her dance, would forever baptize her as The goddessin the work of the same name.
Recently widowed by her husband and guitarist, Joaquín Amador, the dancer (National Dance Award in 2007 and Medal of Merit in Fine Arts in 2018) cannot help but be moved by his memory. She confesses that she thought about leaving everything and that she is having a hard time getting back on stage. She has decided to withdraw from it, but she announces a farewell tour that seems long and for which there is no end date: this year alone, more than twenty performances await her. She declares that she considers herself strong enough to continue extolling what she, humbly, believes she has contributed to flamenco: “having always followed the pure, the canons, without doing atrocities.”
To premiere the spectacle of their foreseeable long goodbye, Always Manuela, Carrasco chose the Jerez Festival, where it has been present since its inception. The work configured for this is a synthesis and compendium of his concept of dance. She dominates the scene with her mere presence, with her figure and her gaze. She lets herself be soaked by the song that inspires her before her arms are raised solemnly. She carefully outlines slow steps to then surrender to feet that are moved by her rapture and rhythm. And she enjoys herself with pleasure in the movements of a dance that seems inexhaustible in its majesty.
Two additional elements marked the performance: the memory of her husband—with his solitary guitar illuminated on stage before his proverbial soleá—and the moment in which she symbolized a kind of relief in the person of her daughter, also Manuela. She embodies the continuity of a unique style that her mother keeps alive.
With anthological intention
In the last week of the Jerez cycle, two other premieres also with a woman's name and with a common anthological intention took place. Firstly, the dancer and choreographer Úrsula López, who had concluded her time as director of the Andalusian Flamenco Ballet with great work., The Butterfly Cursefocused on women's dance in the time of Federico García Lorca, decided, now with his own company, to follow in the poet's wake in flamenco dance, focusing on this occasion on the choreographies of the men who, after Lorca's murder , inside and outside our borders—which is to say exile—waved the verses and inspiration of an author who, according to López, “has not stopped dancing.”
The ambitious project, the product of exhaustive and commendable research, has been brought to the stage with a large corps de ballet (four male dancers and four female dancers), which gives life to a review of the heritage that is carried out with fidelity, from a perspective that , even though it is current, does not betray it. With a dynamic succession of choreographies, in which the choral and the individual alternate, we move from the years of the civil war to those of the transition: a journey from the geometric verticality of Vicente Escudero to the final jubilant vitality exhibited by the I remember Mario Maya. Between these two poles, paintings accumulate that can contain strong emotion for those who recognize the traces of the masters: the fantastic dance of Antonio Ruiz, the canonical soleá of El Güito, the character dance of Farruco, the elegance of the paintings from Gades…
With memories of other masters such as José Greco, Enrique El Cojo and José Limón, the work contained moments with sufficient capacity to transmit per se emotions to any layman. The solitary and beautiful dance of Úrsula López for Perrate's saeta serves as an example. The singing and music of an excellent ensemble, wisely led by guitarist Alfredo Lagos, rounded out the work.
From choral to individual exercise, dancer Mercedes Ruiz offered another tribute to dance, although of a more personal nature, by bringing together the styles that have inspired her in her career, always with the expressed need to show her growth through them. From the Sevillian initials and fandangos to the final tessera of styles—in which tangos, guajira, taranta or abandon them without a break in continuity—, a purely dance exercise is presented for which Ruiz chose the complicity of a guest artist, José Maldonado, of a very different style from his own. The dialectical opposition was positive, by allowing dialogues in successive steps in two in which the personal always seemed to find complementary and reciprocal assistance. It happened like this in the dance of a seguiriya: she with a bata de cola and chopsticks and he appearing to evoke images typical of historical couples. The same thing could have happened with the polo performance, with a succession of scenes guided by the singing versatility of David Lagos.
With the cantaor using palo seca combining airs of cantiñas, Mercedes embraced the preciousness of dance forms stripped of artifice and full of charm. Maldonado had room for her most personal and classic display with the popular The Vitus, accompanied by the solo guitar of Santiago Lara. All of this within a collected, intimate stage format, where he prioritized the balance between all the parts.
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