Silvia Calado Olivo

DRAMATIS FLAMENCAE

"We're in Navisa, on Herramientas Street, which used to be C Street". And Herramientas crosses Nanas de Espinas and is near Andalucía Amarga. Odd street names for an industrial complex adjacent to the humble Seville neighborhood of Cerro del Águila. The thing is, this is where Salvador Távora was born seventy years ago. And this cold framework of workshops and warehouses is where stage sets are put together for La Cuadra, the popular theater group that marked a new path in flamenco expression during Spain's transition to democracy with works such as Herramientas, Nanas de Espinas, Andalucía Amarga...or with that before and after called Quejío. A small frame and slight build sheathed in a fine Cuban shirt, gray ponytail, childlike grin, and inquisitive eyes personify the creative entity of that flamenco theater, that dramatis flamencae...

Salvador Távora

How did Salvador Távora first come into contact with flamenco?

I didn't come into contact with flamenco...flamenco was inside me at birth. I was born in a neighborhood where flamenco was a normal language, in the Cerro de Águila, where there were singers, each with a personal style. I used to hang out with Vizco Amate, I listerned to El Papero sing soleares. Flamenco was just another sound in my life. Just as I would listen to a water fountain or a passing mulecart, I would listen to flamenco cante.

You were even a singer yourself...

I sang what I knew about everything I hadn't learned at school, about what they sang in the neighborhood in those days. It was a very important experience. I got into cante by way of bullfighting. In the days when I was bullfighting, when I was a novillero, flamenco and bullfighting were very closely related. Naturally, whenever there was a bullfight, you were surrounded by flamenco friends. Bullfighting events, which I have lived from within and from without, were always held with their corresponding popular expression which is flamenco. They are grassroots expressions that are in perfect harmony. Both flamenco and bullfighting are illiterate art forms...they don't require literacy to be pronounced.

Later on, when I began to think about theater, I used the language I knew, which was cante. But I didn't use it as a virtuouso form of the vocal chords - I've always been against virtuosity in flamenco - but rather I used it, even when I sang in my own shows, as an anguished cry, as a way of saying things that couldn't be spoken in those days.

Because you also ran up against censorship...

Of course. But cante was what completely escaped the censors because although the verses were camouflaged, you could never camouflage the suffering in the voice. And that was a very significant and easy way of connecting, with the pain in the voice. There are those like Félix Grande, who say that cante can be considered from the very beginning, up until mi first show Quejío and from then on. With Quejío, a show with nothing but cante, it was demonstrated that cante is not just a virtuoso thing but rather a means of communication that goes beyond gestures and beyond words... And only its tonality reveals the suffering of the downtrodden people of Andalucía. I took away from the singer all that was not of the singer: the ruffled shirt, the gold chains, the rings and the suit so carefully ironed that it looked like a waiter's uniform. I gave flamenco a blue-collar look, by putting the singer together with his tools of the trade and distancing the cabaret and entertainment tone of the tablao. Flamenco is principally an expression of suffering, and afterwards it's whatever you want it to be. But naturally, as suffering, it has a great deal to do with the life of the person who sings it. The thing is that singers sometimes have tried to live their life on one side, and carry on with flamenco on the other. But that's very difficult.

Salvador Távora, "Carmen"

That's what you said back then: "The reality of Andalucía goes one way, and cante the other".

It was inconceiveable that in those days, a people who emigrated, who had to leave without work and went singing their painful seguiriyas, should be represented by popular ditties and verses that portrayed Andalucía as paradise. Anyone with a minimal amount of intelligence, could see that Andalusian artistic expression went one way, and the people's situation the other. And that's bad. When a community's artistic expression becomes distanced from reality, one of the two has problems.

Flamenco has been badly hurt by outside academics. Flamenco cannot be studed in a clinical way, but rather from within, knowing how to sing...and knowing how to sing without having learned from records, for back then there weren't any records. And always studying it in accordance with, and in relation to the social reality, it can never be studied separately from the social situation, nor from the singer, nor his or her place of birth. Mining cante is mining cante, fandangos is fandangos, and seguiriyas bears all the gypsy suffering. Cante is closely related to reality. For this reason the academics who don't want to get involved and only want to stay with the virtuoso or sound angle, are perpetrating a crime against flamenco

And don't you think that flamenco still has a lot to complain about although it has become too bourgeois?

Yes, yes, yes. The greatest danger for flamenco, including the dance, far more than fusion or a few people's experimentation, is that it has become completely bourgeois, it's gone out of its context and out of its social reality. Because it is directed and manipulated. Many small middle-class people are leading the way with a concept of the art that is too strict and controlled. Cante can't be classified as if it were apples and oranges. Cante is a creation of the individual and creation can never be subjected to a straightjacket nor mapped out. I think they are making a mistake, that they would be better off if they studied mathematics because they do a lot of harm to the creator.

Fandango was one of the richest forms - before they messed around with it, I don't why, making it a minor form. Just look how rich it was, that each neighborhood had its own form of fandango, there was no singer without his personal style, and then his personality in seguiriya, in soleá, in debla... But a singer defined with his fandango his particular way of thinking and way of being. That insistence on making flamenco and dancing bourgeois is terrible. I've always fought against frivolous flamenco and against the tablao because I've lived it from the inside and it hurt. I've fought to raise the status of seguiriyas and deblas and martinetes in serious shows, far away from the restaurants where flamenco was sung so people could have a pleasant dinner. I believe that flamenco's proper place has never been in any of those locations. And I've not only lived it, but I've suffered it from within! That life experience I've had, nobody can argue with it, which is why I have complete freedom to say what I say, as I live it and feel it.

How did you discover that flamenco expression dovetailed with theatrical expression?

I didn't put flamenco into the theater. I made a theater out of flamenco. Ever since the end of the last century, nearly all the literary authors of theater works started out saying that they were making flamenco experiences, and they would use a singer who sang from off-stage, another who would sing in a chair.... Not me. I've made cante into a dramatic expression per se. Now I'm turning down the volume because I'm beginning to open the door to other Andalusian forms of expression such as those of labor. In the first works flamenco was a dramatic expression. I sang as best I could, moving a cement mixer around, or stretched out on the floor, or standing up. Cante was a show unto itself, and it was accompanied by body language and the suffering in the voice. And because it was unmistakeable, there were no words. Each cante had its meaning, and elements of cante, such as a cement mixer or a rake or a scythe or some kind of music, all worked together.

How do you define that theater of flamenco?

It's defined in Quejío. In order to speak about oppression, all I had to do was put the cantes. The cante of liberation is bulerías, the cante of oppression, a seguiriya, the accusatory cante is martinete...each cante has a dramatic sense. I've used flamenco sensibility to create a work with a theme. Now in Carmen the women singers are singing what a tenor or a soprano would sing in traditional opera, they tell the story through their cante. And that is very far removed from the small bourgeois framework where they want flamenco to be shown off or to subsist. I think this is a mistake because it'll end up as a party so that everyone can feel good and enjoy their dinner. Cante has to go directly above the people, to influence the direction towards a better way of life, like all art. Art which does not serve to create a better society, more cultured, more committed to its time, more just, any art which does not contribute to this - and flamenco is an art form above all else - is a mistaken art.

Salvador Távora, "Quejío"

Your work appears to contradict the sense of the individual in flamenco: flamenco as individual expression, or as group expression?

All the choruses of all my shows are taken from individual cantes, from alboreás, from threshing songs, from lullabies... One of my greatest challenges in the theater is to turn the anguished individual lament of flamenco into a choral and collective expression. And sometimes I manage to get people who go out singing the chorus of alboreás or of debla. All the choruses in my work are taken from a cante, from individual anguish.

And the bullfight...

The relationship between flamenco and bullfighting is historic. Those people at the Bienal (of Flamenco in Seville) who said that it was a bullfighting show are historically and completely off-base. Flamenco is involved with bullfighting in every way, not just in the personal relationship between bullfighters and singers, which is very close, but in the fact that they are popular expressions born from the same popular concept of art. They are manifestations that cannot be separated one from the other. Flamenco, like bullfighting, is a popular collective invention. There is no kind of academic support in history. The slaughterhouse is one of the places where cante is most developed. Thousands of bullfighters have come out of Seville's abattoirs. It was a hotbed of bullfighting and of followers of flamenco cante. I lived through that when I was a child...the butchers in the slaughterhouse bars. Cante was so associated with those workplaces that for me it's very difficult to separate them, especially when an audience just as soon attends a bullfight as a cante festival.

But the union of art, performance and death which occurs in Carmen or Don Juan en los ruedos has not always been well-understood...

Only the Catalonian administration looked upon bullfighting as savagery and not as art. And they lost. It's like when they used to talk about flamenco protests... And flamenco was always an insidious cante, with a certain air of rebelliousness. Just like bullfighting. As opposed to other art forms that are more appropriate to the museum, bullfighting has always been a sign of rebellion, the exaltation of people who were able to raise the profession of butcher to the realm of art. The tradition of the bullfight has belonged to Mediterranean civilization ever since the beginning. What I've tried to do, and what I'm going to try to do with other art forms, is introduce regimented bullfighting as art. I'm going to try to introduce a variety of art forms to avoid those small, bourgeois concepts of classification. I mix different kinds of art without destroying them. I harmonize flamenco with the sound of a machine, the guitar with the sound of a hammer, and choral voices with the solo, but always allowing each element to keep itplace without losing its characteristics. The bull is the only animal alive which has a right to life. All the rest are fattened for eating. The bull destined for the ring is the only animal that lives in freedom until the hour of its death. We're in danger of spoiling the only tradition which is a product of the reflection upon life and death, upon how we want to live and how we want to die. It's very easy to laugh that off. And I'm very pleased to have achieved that unity between bulls, flamenco, music, equestrian art, and things that are all ours, considered cliché by some, but which are not. They become trite when they are falsified, but when they are not falsified they do not. A women wearing a shawl the way my mother and my grandmother did, that's not a cliché, it's our own reality. Just as a bullfighter risking his life in front of a bull is not a cliché. Cliché is a guy dressed up as a bullfighter singing Spanish light opera.

The contemplation of life and death is ever-present in your work...

Yes. It's present in me. And in flamenco. Flamenco is a blood question. I live in constant fear of everything. It's something beyond willpower. But I don't know why a certain sector of Andalusians has inherited that. I satisfy myself with knowing that I'm not alone, and the comparison encourages me. Picasso was the same, and Lorca, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Alberti and Bécquer... There are many people from Andalucía who have had death as the centerpiece of their meditation all throughout their lives. What you have to do is not have a complex about death, but rather an aristocratic concept of death. You must have a specifically aristocratic spirit. The person who reflects upon life and death has an aristocratic spirit. Death has nothing to do with anything grotesque, or with darkness. That's how it is seen in cante. If you take love and death away from cante, which are the two themes that give it substance and keep flamenco alive, then you kill it. When flamenco only speaks about happiness, it will only last as long as a restaurant.

And how can a product which is the result of an artistic, social or vital obligation fit into a capitalistic structure?

I have my own theory about that. The product has to be the result of your social, esthetic and artistic convictions. If a capitalist society is willing to embrace that product, you are perfectly able to sell that product because you are conscious that if there is bad will in that society, that product is going to be indigestible. What you can never do is create a product to be sold to that capitalist society. When La Cuadra began to make the rounds of the universities, the neighborhood organizations, European political centers, it was fine. Then, the first time we got into a theater with a middle-class audience, they started to accuse us of making small bourgeois products. But we were bringing the same products.

What you can't do is produce to sell. You hear people say "Salvador put a bull there...". Look, it's not that way. There are six bulls every day at the bullfights and nobody goes. I'm doing a study about the bull and provoking reflection about bullfighting as art, about the relationship between bullfighting as a popular medium, and cante. I am aware of what I'm doing, and it's not to sell a product, but rather because I feel it that way. If they buy the product, and the person who buys it doesn't suffer indigestion, all the better. The Catalonian government thought they were going to get indigestion and didn't want it, which is why they fought not to have it. If you put a bull in a show raised to a cultural level and elevated to art, that makes it all the more difficult to forbid bullfights. But you have to be aware that you're going, not to sell, but rather to see that your creation is not mutilated and that it contributes to making society think in a different way.

Don't you miss the fact that theater has lost its social purpose?

There is no art which doesn't have a dual purpose to fulfill: the social and the artistic. Art which only fulfills the social function is demagogic. Art which only seeks to entertain doesn't fulfill its purpose either. Aristotle defined it in his poetics of art. He said that in the theater it was very easy to do tragedy, it was a concession of transcendent individuals. And that comedy was a kind of imitation of quotidian vulgarity. And that's how it is. If you've got a work conceived from a transcendent mentality, you go for transcendent tragedy. If you make a show only to entertain, I think that's fine. But I don't think that entertainment is a social or artistic function. What's happening with theater in Madrid? That it continues to be a show for the ladies after they've had their tea.

The same thing happens with television programs, there is a frivolous element in society. Those shows fulfill no social function, but rather cause social alientation. Perhaps it is desired, but I don't think it's honest. If it's also entertaining, fine, but be aware whose purposes it serves. There was a time when an easy distinction was made: right-wing shows and left-wing shows. The left-wing shows were the ones that made you think. Those that were sheer nonsense were supposedly apolitical, but they were just as political as the others, although their role was different. It's the same thing with cante. Cante has a fundamental purpose: to make people feel, enjoy and think. What you cannot do is change it, as happened at one time, into an art for entertainment and for parties. But not 'fiestas' as we understand them in Andalucía, where it can sometimes be a cry, where tears can be a sign of contentment. There are things people have gotten very confused, and flamenco even more so. I read things that make me very sad... How can you possibly confuse flamenco exclusively with enjoyment and with parties?

There was something Mairena told me that I liked: that I've always been more concerned with why people sang than how they sang. And half the studios focus on how something is sung. I'm not that worried about the precision with which something is sung, not like those academic archaeologists who study the forms, but quite the contrary. Why did Manolito María sing like that? Why did Terremoto sing that way? Why did the greats sing the way they did?