To experience truth in flamenco dancing, the spellbound observer must see beyond the mere athletics and intensity of this brilliant discipline to its deeper aspects of emotional awareness.
The members of the celebrated dance company Furia Flamenca, along with its founder Estela Velez, will take audiences to that subliminal place of sultry love, overpowering happiness and unspeakable sadness when they perform Sunday. Their program, “Lorca: Flamenco Poetry,” is a tribute to the Spanish poet and musician through his music and their interpretation of his work.
“Yes, flamenco is a very athletic dance because of all the footwork, stomping and rhythmic movements we do,” Velez said. “But what makes and completes the dance is what goes in between those moments of footwork.”
Flamenco, she explained, was actually created by the Gypsies to portray and memorialize their hardship, their happiness and their story of immigration to southern Spain.
“Flamenco is their pad and paper,” Velez continued. “It is their diary that you are watching; with all the aches and pains, the romance and love stories of their lives. There was happiness when they were celebrating something good and heartaches when they lost someone.”
The 50-minute program, complete with 14 dancers, two guitarists, two singers, a percussionist and a violinist, re-creates Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias,” an homage to one of the most celebrated bullfighters in Spain, who, himself, was tragically gored to death.
The second half of the show includes a guitar performance by Maestro Torcuato Zamora, a dance choreographed to the haunting “Romance Sonambulo (Verde)” and several of Lorca’s uplifting works.
The program closes with the beautiful “Casidas De Palomas Oscuras,” performed by the dance company to musical arrangement by Guillermo Christie.
The splendor of colorful costumes, along with the ferocity and passion of flamenco, will dazzle the audience, even as the living, breathing emotion of the work grips them.
“The dance gets better with age as the dancer experiences life,” Velez said.
