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Blanca del Rey, flamenco bailaora. Interview (2)

The creation. Soleá with a shawl

Silvia Calado. Madrid, September 2006
Photos: Daniel Muñoz

It flies. It spins. It slides. It hides a countenance. Blanca del Rey and the shawl dance por soleá. And that baile has become the artist’s trademark and a classic in flamenco choreography. The Córdoba-born bailaora faces creation according to life. If the soleá was born as if by distillation in search of Córdoba, the seguiriya was born as a catharsis of pain. She reflects on the roads to creation.

At the same time you’ve upheld precision, you’ve been held to be a creator in flamenco dancing. How do you project that capacity?

	Blanca del Rey. Soleá with a shawl. 2006 Festival de Jerez (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

And developing flamenco. But for that you have to bear in mind what I’ve just said. A year ago Córdoba’s Institute of Flamencology asked me to give a lecture and for me it was personal research into my own knowledge, into what I’d discovered over so much time. I explained the flamenco styles one by one, but not like archaeological flamenco using a bibliography, but with the interest of a personal vision. I spoke, for example, about the seguiriya. It’s a tragedy; nothing can go so far. It has its stuff, its macho or its cabales, it has respect for the cante and tradition, respect for the rhythm. The guitarist must base himself on that rhythm to make music. And that rhythm by itself is like a repetitive mantra. When you take the seguiriya and breathe it without dancing and you let it pierce you, it’s unbelievable. The seguiriya is like a liberating mantra of the tragedy of life. All the pain’s there. That repetitive one-two-three-one-two-one-two, with that weight, makes an impression. But if instead of doing your research along those lines, you go to the banal, to the shuffling steps, to see juggling, to see how you finish it off to get applause, then you lose the enrichment as an artist and the enrichment as a person. Flamenco teaches you to live and helps you to live.

Do you relate your doing yoga to the matter of flamenco?

When I said the seguiriya is like a mantra it’s because you take the seguiriya, start listening to it, go inside yourself, and it relieves your pain. A mantra is that; it’s that identification of that sound you let pierce you and which causes harmony in you and frees you. Yoga is breathing; it’s life. We just breathe superficially, so we aren’t nourishing either our blood or our cells; you feel stress and the stress causes you to breathe worse and that causes more stress. You can’t interiorize anything or understand anything because you block up. Knowing how to breathe gives you maturity. Words can never give you the dimension you get from playing the guitar, singing, dancing or anything you do in life. And breathing, you end up doing it unselfishly, because you don’t want anything, you don’t have too much of anything because you aren’t missing anything. You aren’t missing yourself. You don’t live outward, you live inward. You compose for yourself, you dance for yourself... and if others want to see it, well then let them see it. You aren’t selling yourself out. Let the world move however it wants; I’m not trying to convince anybody. I’ve cultivated my thinking a lot; I’ve always tried for it to go with my conduct, to be really coherent.

With thought, art reaches its full dimension, doesn’t it?

Of course. That’s another story. You already have art like that as an enriching way to help you see life differently. In baile you’ve already found breathing, the beat of the essence of things and it’s that simple, but that hard to find that point with a view to living with a quality of life which has nothing to do with the things you might have. We all want to have things; we live in a consumer society, but what you can’t do is surrender to them. And that’s hard in this society.

Blanca del Rey. Soleá (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

Inevitably, you have to talk about the soleá with a shawl.

It’s now a classic.

How was that so praised choreography born?

I had a really great interest in creating a baile which you could see was Córdoba. It seemed really hard to me because that wasn’t reflected by just raising your arms or spinning around. Then sculptor Sanguino invited me to his house-studio, a lovely palace in the “Madrid of the Austrias” quarter, and he showed me a film about Manolete. I’d never seen Manolete, but I’d lived across from his house. And I’d had that mythical figure nearby since I was a little girl. His nieces used to talk to me about him, about his tragedy, about the authenticity of his art. It was all there; we don’t realize how the mind absorbs everything and it comes out.

I was in Madrid one day in 1980 at a rehearsal doing the caña with Talegón, Felipe Maya, Curro de Jerez... I didn’t want to get down to put on the bata de cola and I told Talegón, “Come on, sing for me”. And he started singing for me por soleá. My mother came in with an impressive recently-ironed shawl which had been given to me as a gift by my husband’s uncle, who was an antique dealer. It was a black shawl with ivory white embroidering. I grabbed it and they started playing por soleá. I used to dance the caña in a bata and with a shawl, the traditional way, but I was wearing a short dress when that came about. And I started working, and working... My husband was watching the rehearsal and told me I had to do it. I told him he was crazy. And he answered that if I didn’t present it I was a coward, that I hadn’t realized what I’d done, that it was Julio Romero de Torres, a Jew who was wandering down the street... Your culture comes out, what you’ve imagined, in this case, about your streets in Córdoba. We patched it together and I presented it at Morería. Not so elaborate, but the outline was there.

And the seguiriya?

The seguiriya comes from another channel. The primitive seguiriya of El Planeta finishing por cabales was born as a result of my mother’s death. I didn’t dance for a very long time and I found relief in that rhythm. The subject of creation is very complex. There are creations in which the mental side comes into play a lot. Then there are creations which come like the seguiriya, which moreover coincided with a ligament problem. I was lame for six months and my mother was really ill. And in that period, when I thought I’d never dance again, I went into my studio and listened to seguiriyas. And I began studying the old-time cantes from Hispavox’s ‘Magna Antología’. That’s how I found the primitive seguiriya of El Planeta, a seguiriya from the past which guitar would be born from. Then when I recovered, I got back up after having lived the seguiriya in solitude and with my hard problems; that’s how I found the seguiriya.

Blanca del Rey
(Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

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