Radical flavours in contemporary flamenco

“I couldn’t move my hands, I couldn’t lift my arms above my head.” The Granada-born flamenco choreographer Manuel Liñán is telling me about the dance training he received as a boy. “When I placed my hands on my body, they had to be straight. My head had to be still — no circular movement.” 

Such were the rules for male dancers 30 years ago. Liñán envied the fluid, expressive movements of his female counterparts, who swirled their hands in graceful circles. For his generation, a heavily gendered education laid out strict codes for how men and women should move and look in flamenco — and conforming was necessary for progressing a career in the mainstream. “There were programmers who told me not to wear tassels on my jacket,” Liñán, now 43, recalls, “because men shouldn’t dress like that.”

In an art form so steeped in tradition and virtuosity, one might expect certain conservatisms. But flamenco was once a voice for dissidence — a song of protest, a lament for the oppressed. Differing styles such as seguiriya and soleá sing of sorrow and injustice among neglected Romani communities, who have always been one of the the most significant forces in the formation of flamenco, while the metallic beat of the martinete recalls disenfranchised blacksmiths who sang to the sounds of hammers and anvils. Today, many contemporary practitioners are re-embracing the radical and anti-establishment origins of flamenco, with transgressive, feminist and queer approaches shattering its conventions.

Liñán eventually built a name from his work with the bata de cola, the long-trained dress that female dancers are taught to use. He was in London last year with his work ¡Viva!, which saw a troupe of men performing as female bailaoras, complete with ruffled skirts, Manila shawls and flowers in the hair.

Flamenco assumed its most conservative aspect, to become part of the popular culture that Franco wanted to promote 

Now he is developing an experimental new work, sections of which he will perform at the annual Flamenco Festival at Sadler’s Wells, about his own sexuality. He is also exploring the copla, an early-20th-century singing style which he says is full of hidden meanings about same-sex relationships. “Gay people were persecuted, so one of the ways they could express themselves was through music,” he explains. “Their declarations of love became songs.”

The dance historian Fernando López Rodríguez, author of the 2020 book Queer History of Flamenco, traces cross-dressing in flamenco and its parallel forms back to the late 19th century. Women such as Dora la Gitana and Trinidad la Cuenca famously dressed in men’s clothes and embodied male identities both on and off the stage. “Today, we might understand them as non-binary or trans,” explains López Rodríguez. Male performers who cross-dressed, such as Edmond de Bries, were also pivotal in aligning flamenco with the creative impulses of some of the most marginalised people. The book continues to more recent examples such as Tamara La Gitana, a trans flamenco dancer who died of Aids-related illness, and Antonio Canales’s performance as Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, both in the 1990s.

For the dancer Olga Pericet, the earliest germinations of flamenco in the late 19th century — what she calls “pre-flamenco” — are inextricable from the changing social role of women at the time. I meet the Córdoba-born powerhouse in Madrid where she is rehearsing her latest work, also to be performed at the Flamenco Festival. It takes its name from the first prototype of the modern Spanish guitar, built in 1856, which Pericet sees as the birth of flamenco.

The luthier behind this revolutionary instrument, Antonio de Torres, called his creation La Leona (The Lioness), for the growl it made when strummed. It’s an apt word for Pericet herself, a ferocious performer who prowls the stage with a mane of wild hair, as if marking the territory of her lair. Even in rehearsals, the muscles across her back ripple as she writhes and pulsates on the ground, later dancing a farruca (traditionally performed by men) dressed in a black suit.

Throughout her investigations of the beginnings of flamenco, Pericet found a Spanish society that morally condemned women who earned their own money through art, performance and entertainment. The cafés cantantes in which they performed were known for prostitution; their bodies were subject to the male gaze as objects of desire. Amid fears about women’s growing independence and autonomy, the flamenco dancer was rendered an alluring yet terrifying figure. “It was said that the first gitanas [Romani women] who danced flamenco were witches who hypnotised men,” explains Pericet, “but really they were just free women.”

Alongside other trailblazers such as Rocío Molina and Israel Galván, Pericet belongs to a generation of artists that has pushed contemporary flamenco into radical directions, exploring the grotesque, the absurd and the theatrical. Molina’s latest brainchild, Carnación, is a stormy duet with the musician Niño de Elche, in which they carry out various physical acts — dressing, undressing, beating, tying up, dragging around — on each other. The two bodies wrestle, embrace, collide and fall apart, before surrendering to a deranged, cathartic chaos. Currently touring Spain, the work has been received as a groundbreaking exploration of desire, intimacy and repression by two prominent queer artists in flamenco.

Deconstructive approaches such as Molina’s and Pericet’s are saturated with movement, aesthetics and music from outside flamenco — but their revolutionary spirit recalls the primal origins of the form. Unlike more institutionalised dances propelled by French influences in Spain in the 19th century, the emergence of flamenco signalled something far more visceral and impure — and it’s this “dirty” quality that interests Pericet. “Impurity is something marvellous,” she says: a “contamination of cultures” that imbued flamenco with its richness and that now charges the ancestral roar of Pericet’s lioness.

Still, normative attitudes in modern flamenco are hard to shake off. Some trace these back to the mid-20th century, when the Franco regime began using flamenco to attract foreign tourism to Spain — but a cleaned-up version, devoid of its essential wildness. “The hybrid and experimental elements disappeared,” explains López Rodríguez. “Some of the most avant-garde artists died or were exiled. Flamenco assumed its most conservative aspect, to become part of the popular culture that Franco wanted to promote.” 

Artists are addressing the lasting impact of this today. In Barcelona, I meet the founders of Flamenco Queer, which began as a grassroots project reclaiming the form for the LGBTQ+ community. Led by dancer Rubén Heras and UK-born guitarist Jero Férec, the initiative celebrates the persistence of flamenco’s queer influences and aesthetics.

“We’re trying to create a safe space where queer audiences can experience authentic flamenco,” says Férec. I watch them at a bar called La Federica, where they perform against a backdrop of sparkly drapes; disco lights flicker while the singer’s quejío (wail) intoxicates the crowd. Heras describes the project as a “reconciliation” for queer people alienated from flamenco and the repression that it became associated with.

Equally reconciliatory is Pericet’s attempt to redress the power imbalance of Torres’s lioness guitar — a heavily feminised object caressed by male hands. Embodying the instrument herself, Pericet reclaims that eroticised female form, channelling its ferocity and power.

“Flamenco is anarchic,” she says — true of both its form and its social function. And so too is the beast that she wants to embody on stage: “It’s the animal that we all carry inside us.”

Flamenco Festival 2023, Sadler’s Wells, London, July 5-15, sadlerswells.com

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