COLMENA FLAMENCA NYC

Flamencos de Gañanía (Rich Harvest)

Feb 13 • 3 pm EST
Virtual (Zoom)

Based on first-hand accounts, this upcoming virtual talk with Estela Zatania draws you into the fascinating story of itinerant field-workers in Southern Spain, and how they helped preserve and define flamenco.

$15 or FREE for NYC Flamenco Passholders!

NEW BOOK RELEASE

Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots: The Body Questions

edited by K. Meira Goldberg & Antonio Pizà

Long-time Flamenco Vivo artist, dear friend, and esteemed scholar La Meira has co-edited a book that just released:

“This collection of essays poses a series of questions revolving around nonsense, cacophony, queerness, race, and the dancing body. How can flamenco, as a diasporic complex of performance and communities of practice frictionally and critically bound to the complexities of Spanish history, illuminate theories of race and identity in performance? How can we posit, and argue for, genealogical relationships within and between genres across the vast expanses of the African—and Roma—diaspora? Neither are the essays presented here limited to flamenco, nor, consequently, are the responses to these questions reduced to this topic. What all the contributions here do share is the wish to come together, across disciplines and subject areas, within the academy and without, in the whirling, raucous, and messy spaces where the body is free—to celebrate its questioning, as well as the depths of the wisdom and knowledge it holds and sometimes reveals.”

THE COLMENA FLAMENCA

We always say flamenco artists are adaptable. But what does this look like in practice?

Hint: For someone we know, it involved a makeshift venue where pigs had to be escorted out of the area and straw had to be cleared from the floor to make space.

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Adaptability is often posited as a strength that flamenco teaches, but that can seem abstract. Here’s an anecdote from Estela Zatania to remind us all what it looks like in action.

Sometimes adaptability looks like dancing for an audience in a barn. That’s right––A BARN! Hear about Estela’s experience while touring as a dancer in Spain:
“We headed for Extremadura, towns so small, not one street was paved. In one such town the municipal authorities had set up a makeshift ‘theater’ in a large barn. A couple of confused pigs were escorted to another area, but someone had to remove the straw that covered the floor. Everyone in the company was given a pitchfork to clear space for “seating” – everyone but the guitarists that is, who refused to help alleging the need to protect their hands. People would be bringing their own folding chairs and crates to sit on. There was no running water, so we moistened our make-up sponges in leftover Coca Cola.”