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"Carmen Amaya. 1963".
Carmen Amaya. Her Dancing
It has been said
that she was the anti-academy, the anti-school and it is true that Carmen Amaya
encouraged strength and speed; that she broke away from the earlier quietness
of the dancers, and however she followed literally the structure of the dances
as they had been previously. Her way of dancing may seem anarchic to us, intuitive,
but it is only in appearance. It is true that she didn't want any academy, even
Sebastiá Gasch and Vicente Escudero convinced her father not to take her
to one. And the thing is she didn't need it, she had the school at home.
Photography by Colita
Carmen Amaya grew
up among good gypsies who apart from bringing her up taught her. Her mother danced
very well but she couldn't devote herself to it due to the number of children
she had. Her aunt La Faraona, an excellent dancer, and her father completed her
education with very hard classes of even six consecutive hours.
Carmen Amaya marked
the difference with that dancing of hers which seemed to have been convinced more
as a spiritual and aesthetic necessity than just professional exercise. Singular
dancing, against the flow which bewildered everybody and which caused a revolution
in the gypsy dancing concepts at the moment, operating in a new horizon of unlimited
perspectives.
Photography by Colita
Her dancing shows
the greatest violence and strength which has been made out of gypsy dancing, dramatic
contortions striking wrong stances. She has a temperament in which abstracts herself
from everything surrounding her and which makes time stop for everybody looking
at her, which transcends all sense of one's own outer existence. She is only ruled
by her inspiration. There is strength and speed in her zapateado unknown until
then-in her arms which moved tiressly, in the violent shaking of her head, in
her facial expression. All eyes were following that hurricane which it seemed
was going to overflow the stage.Where she had to turn once she did so twice and
violently. However, Carmenīs dancing was serious in spite of the turbulence surrounding
her.
Photography by Colita
Her rhythmical
beat was made of iron, with a prodigious sense of rhythm, with an extremely rigorous
tempo, which made people enjoy it for its perfect precision in a whirlwind of
movements. Nobody made the turns like her, fast and perfect, making them even
more difficult when she allowed herself her magnificent broken turn going back
which nobody but her has ever made. She very often extemporized, she was always
creating something new on the way and suddenly synchronized with all the others
in a call which seemed to stop at the peak moment. Carmen had the most absolute
domain of the "son" music, exchanging the "plant" with the
one with "strike and heel". When she did the redouble going back in
the zapateado, the rhythmical heeling was unique and perfect.
Her repertoire
wasn't, by any means, as short as some have wanted to make out. She frequently
danced Soleá, Bulerías, Taranto, Alegrías, Siguiriyas, Fandangos
and a Garrotín which was a tornado, a compendium of all her abilities in
a major key.
First, she danced
the "song" with her knuckles on the table with a dry sound which filled
all the space. Then, she did the palm-clapping and zapateado together at a furious
speed. Her arms gesticulated feverishly passing and passing again in front of
her face, double turns which she cut immediately, with her following skirt fluttering
and much fury in her face. It was fantastic, the dancer was pure energy and instead
of spending it, she seemed to generate it dancing.
It was a dancing
made consciously a total physical effort, being aware of her responsibility she
gave herself body and soul. It was worthwhile, her movements were not grotesque,
even the turns which touched acrobatics didn't disappoint the audience. They were
technically perfect and they finished in a dry finish which had never been seen
before.
She worked on a
basic aspect of gypsy dancing, introversion based on the continuous movement of
the arms which took them inside; in the last period of her life she emphasized
it by clenching her fist and pressing her arms against her body as can be seen
in some sequences of Los Tarantos.
In spite of her
frequent participation in films, she herself said that: "Dancing for the
cinema is never completely genuine. Everything is calculated almost, planned from
the beginning. The theatre is something else: agility,pure emotion. Definitively,
gypsy dancing".
Francisco Hidalgo
Gómez
The
Carmen Amaya Web
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