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There aren't a lot of creators in flamenco... and especially not so prolific ones.

I won't get tired of saying it; I'm one-eyed in the land of the blind at the moment on the choreographic plane. I'd like to bring together everyone from flamenco and show them videos of Jiri Kilyan, Mats Ek and Georg Balanchine for them to understand what choreographic work really is. We use different languages, but choreography is international. You can dance in English or you can dance in Spanish, but choreographically it's the same as a book: you tell the story well or you don't tell it well.

Do you see advancement on flamenco's choreographic scene?

No, on the contrary. I see people who used to do much more interesting things years ago than the ones they're doing now. Laziness, coziness... I don't know. Flamenco's successful no matter what you do and that makes creators drop anchor.

Javier Latorre

Didn't previous creators such as Antonio Gades and Mario Maya create a school?

We're even losing the references. Young people today don't have the references like we used to have in my day. I managed to work with Antonio Gades, Antonio, Pilar López, Marienma, Alberto Lorca, José Granero... with people who are monsters at the choreographic level. And nowadays young people don't have those kinds of references, nor do they really feel like having them. Not in any of the courses I teach, and I teach a lot of them every year; out of thirty people per class, three are Spanish and they don't do this professionally. We've lost most of the great maestros. Time ago Amor de Dios was the reference in that sense; there were a ton of people there that you could learn from and in one day go to six or seven amazing classes. And that's all history now. Anybody's a maestro, anybody's a choreographer.

We used to live to dance, we didn't dance to live. I used to have five classes a day at the BNE with people like Aurora Pons and Juana Taft in ballet, in Spanish ballet with Bety, in technique with María Magdalena, in flamenco with Paco Fernández and then three or four hours rehearsing the repertoire. Afterwards, we used to stay and do pirouette contests, doing little kicks through bulerías until they kicked us out of the studio. And from there to Amor de Dios, where we were kicked out at ten o'clock at night. And we all went out to dinner together and kept on talking about dancing. And vampirizing everything you could get, since there was no other way.

And do you share that complaint by some flamencos who have gone to the BNE to do a show, that it lacks training?

	"The first thing that a choreographer has to do is to adapt to the people he's working with"

We're getting into murky waters here. The first thing that a choreographer has to do is to adapt to the people he's working with. You can't try and go anywhere to do a choreography that you would dance because none of the people you're working with are you, fortunately. Starting off with that premise, you get there the first day and if you see that the people aren't going to work with what you want to do, you turn around and walk out the door. But to stay, do it and then blame the people for not being flamenco, I don't understand. In a country like ours and in a profession like ours, everyone can choose. But it's very nice to get on a program of the National Ballet and have your choreographies go everywhere and all that, but the blame is certainly to be shared between whoever allows those kids not to be prepared at that level and the choreographer who goes where he shouldn't. But blaming the kids is like killing the messenger.

A couple of years ago you presented your company with the aim of creating quality shows, of founding an institution that would outlive you. What has been the result so far?

Artistically, very good. Both ‘Rinconete y Cortadillo’ and ‘Triana’ have been great creations. Now I just need someone to realize it, be given fewer pats on the back and more performances. The other day I wrote an article for the daily newspaper ‘ABC’ talking about the Bienal and I gave a very expressive example of what I mean: in flamenco we've exchanged the young gentlemen of the past for today's politicians, we've exchanged the country estates for offices. And the only ones going into those offices are artists of the moment, who are usually the ones that appear most on TV, because since politicians don't care about culture, they protect themselves by saying they've brought in the one everybody says is the best. And they don't care at all about the result. As long as that policy doesn't change, until the policy is either neutral or the subsidies disappear and I don't know what other system is created, that's always going to be like that. It's too late now to educate the media. I now think the political authorities, cultural authorities and artists should be the ones to educate the public and the media.

You've always been against subsidized culture, but do you find investors to make a profit on a cultural product?

The thing is that there isn't a patronage law to move private investors to run a company. As long as that doesn't imply tax benefits, economic compensation, that's never going to change. I wish I'd been born in the age of the Medicis, I swear (laughter).

Shall we go on with the positive side of the results?

The good thing about the results is that when I'm no longer here, my daughters will be proud of their father's work; nobody will be able to tell them your father did this and that and his work isn't worth a dime... because look at what appears on TV every time they talk about flamenco.

It's also serving as a breeding ground for soloists. Some bailaores are already excelling such as Daniel Navarro...

And Fuensanta la Moneta, Pedro Córdoba, Mara Martínez... practically all eight who are there, are people with all the chances in the world. It's the greatest satisfaction of all for me, to watch how they dance and read a review today saying that it's the mightiest dance corps there is in flamenco. That fills me with great pride all over. Many of them have been with me since they were nine or ten years old. It's a day-to-day job that's hard to keep up and not to screw up so that they can't tell you “you slipped up there”. And since I wrote the manifiesto, I've had to be even much more on top of things.

Can the manifesto be updated?

We'll leave the manifesto just as it is. Basically, I haven't changed anything. It's very hard for something to change in flamenco in three years; it takes seventy or eighty years for changes. It's been enough satisfaction that a lot of people have read it and my opinion has been heard. And it's curious that even those who know I'm talking about them without naming them, come and congratulate me on having written it and tell me “you're absolutely right”. They consider themselves included, not alluded to.

Besides resting, what projects are on the horizon?

No, my big problem is when I lie down and start to roll around like a lion. For next year there's a cinema project, to do the choreography for a film in England. It's by a producer for the BBC, a sort of love story between an English girl and a Spanish bailaor. Getting mixed up in how a film is shot is a master's for me as far as the lighting, the organization, everything. Just like the musical ‘Los Tarantos’; that's meant opening an amazing door to flamenco's future. There's another project to do a version of Jean Cocteau's ‘Les enfants terribles’ in Paris with Enric Palomar. There are a couple of other things out there. And there's another project still in the early stages for the Mediterranean games ‘Almería 2005’, which is a version of ‘Don Lindo de Almería’ by Bergamín, a precious, surrealistic story. We're shuffling around those things. I imagine some of the four will materialize. The important thing is to keep on learning. I'll die learning. Who knows everything?

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