WHY SPAIN III — FLAMENCO
Because you can hear and see authentic Andalusian flamenco, something you will never forget.
The lights dim, the guitarist starts to play slowly and feet begin to bang on the floorboards in the dark. Slowly the lights come up and there are four men in black who stand clapping as they cry out primally to each other.
You listen to them and soon you get goose bumps and you feel your body come alive as their voices reach to some unknown place deep within you.
Then the male and female dancers come onto the stage swaying in complicated rhythms, as their arms weave around gracefully, their bodies bending and shaking, and their fingers clicking and their feet stamping.
Like jazz they all riff off each other, the singers and the dancers and the guitar players, building up to cascade after cascade of high intensity emotion. The dancers do not sing but they answer the male singers soulful cries with their bodies, listening to their words, and then moving in response to them.
Here Frederico Garcia Lorca describes the flamenco song:
“It is, then, the rarest specimen of primitive song, the oldest in Europe, bearing in its notes the naked, shiver of emotion of the first oriental races.
The Gypsy siguiriya begins with a dreadful cry, a cry that divides the landscape into two perfect hemispheres. It is the cry of dead generations, a poignant elegy for vanished centuries, the evocation of love filled with pathos beneath other winds and other moons.
Then the melodic phrase begins to unfold the mystery of tone, and withdraw the precious stone of a sob, a sonorous tear borne on the river of the voice. No Andalusian, hearing that cry, can resist a quiver of emotion, no regional song can compare in poetic grandeur, and it is seldom, very seldom, that the human spirit has created works of such nature.
Garcia Lorca goes on to say:
“About the year 1400, the Gipsy race fled from India, driven out by the hundred thousand horsemen of the mighty Tamerlane. Twenty years later, their tribes appeared in various European cities, entering Spain with the Saracen armies that periodically arrived on our coast from Egypt and Arabia.
This race, arriving in our own Andalusia, united ancient indigenous elements to what they themselves had brought, and gave definitive form to what we call cante jondo. So it is to them that we owe the creation of these songs, the core of our spirit: to them we owe the construction of those lyrical channels through which all the pain and ritual gestures of the race freely flow.
Whether from the heart of the sierra, the orange groves of Seville, or the harmonious Mediterranean shore, these songs have a common source: Love and Death….but Love and Death as seen by the Sibyl, that deeply oriental character, the true sphinx of Andalusia.
In the depths of all these poems a question lurks, but a terrible question that has no answer. Our people cross their arms in prayer, gaze at the stars, and await in vain a sign of salvation. It is a gesture filled with pathos, but a true one. The poem either poses a profound and unanswerable emotional question, or resolves it in Death, the question of questions.”
THE GUITAR — A POEM BY FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.
