Antonio Gades, a tribute. Special feature

A letter to Antonio Gades

In 1979 I was 16 years old, and for 12 years of my life I'd been “dancing” or, closer to the truth, “fooling around on stages.” That year the Ballet Nacional de España came to Valencia, recently founded and directed by you, maestro. After seeing the show, partly out of excitement and partly out of confusion, I saw how much time I'd wasted as I went off to the dance-hall where I worked back then. Somebody who knew you managed to arrange for me to talk with you. The following day, at the stage door of Valencia's Teatro Principal, at five in the afternoon. For obvious reasons I didn't sleep that night, and the following day I got to the agreed meeting point, but at two in the afternoon just to be sure. Three endless hours later, I saw you coming in the distance, as if in slow motion, like the unrepeatable duel scene from ‘Bodas de sangre’. I saw you pass before me and a sensation of almost religious awe prevented me from moving a single muscle. Momentarily paralyzed, I returned home, started getting my stuff together (I took my boots) and the following week I headed off to Madrid.

I entered the school of the BNE. And I found out that, shortly afterwards, you would choose one of the students there to fill a vacancy in the company. I arrived on the day of the audition and saw you once again approaching along the endless corridor of the Hospital San Carlos, the then headquarters of the Ballet Nacional, and today the site of the Reina Sofía Museum, and felt once again the same sensation of paralysis. While your ungainly figure wrapped in that turtleneck wool sweater and corduroy trousers came toward me, growing in size, my own body shrank until it disappeared. I don't know what you saw in me, maestro, because even though I made a mess of the whole audition, you decided I was to take the position.

Thanks to that, 25 years later, someone is asking me to do you the honor of writing a piece on you. You, maestro, represent not only in my career, but in my life generally, a role model. I never tried to dance like you, nor choreograph like you. I'm sure you'd agree with me that to copy anyone is a waste of time, and much more so when we're talking about someone of your aesthetic prowess and overwhelming character. When I say “a role model”, I'm referring to ethics, to the love for your profession, to respect for your predecessors, to the cutting-edge nature of your work, to your perfectionism and discipline, to your unshakable integrity and loyalty to yourself and to those around you. A series of values that are crumbling by the moment these days, and almost nobody cares.

Now that you're no longer physically here I'll attempt, in moments of dejection, to call to mind one of those meetings with you. Meetings in which, just as in your work, you were concise and direct, no sensationalism, no beating around the bush, and no concessions to the audience; meetings where one had to absorb as much as possible in order to keep the faith. I saw you for the last time, maestro, in Seville, at Teatro Lope de Vega, where the Festival Bienal de Flamenco paid you a well-deserved tribute and I received an award for my choreography. I felt the same way I felt that first time, that profound - almost religious - respect, with the added admiration from seeing you absolutely unchanged in your essence. Pure coherence. Then, behind a microphone, I had a chance to thank you publicly for all you meant to me directly and indirectly throughout my career.

Today, in your absence, at least your work remains as a guiding light for those who lose their way, and as a yardstick against which all those who loved and respected your conception of dance can measure themselves. In the words of the song 'Comandante Che Guevara', from the Cuba you loved so dearly:

Aquí se queda la clara,
La entrañable transparencia
De tu querida presencia…

Compañero Antonio Gades

Here there remains the clear,
The dearly-loved evidence
Of your dear presence…

My companion Antonio Gades

Hasta siempre maestro - you'll always be with us

Javier Latorre

magazine@flamenco-world.com