SEVILLE'S BIENAL DE FLAMENCO 2002. 'DIME'

Laughs, thrills...everything but boredom

Silvia Calado Olivo. Seville, September 9th, 2002

'Dime'. Dancing and choreography: Javier Barón. Guest artist: Diego Carrasco. Cante: Juan José Amador. Guitar: Diego Carrasco, Javier Patino. Percussion: Manuel Soler. Recitation: José Luis Ortiz Nuevo. Special collaboration: Coro de la Presentación de Granada. Music: Javier Patino, Juan José Amador. Staging director: Pepa Gamboa and Belén Candi. Musical direction: Faustino Núñez. Teatro Central. Seville, September 9th, 2002. 9:00 p.m.

"Art should always make you laugh a little and fear a little. Everything except bore. Art has no right to bore". Excuse the quote, but we resort to this thought from the painter Jean Dubuffet to summarize what 'Dime', as the backers prefer to call it, or 'Cielo de verano', as the creators prefer, manages to transmit from a summery, mundane Huerta de San Vicente where Federico García Lorca is ashamed, at his age, of acting so foolishly…

Javier Barón's work inspires fear of tightrope-walking and of death…but at the same time it frightens, it makes you laugh. One image: a hangman's noose turns into a swing. And everyone plays at being Lorca. A Lorca who dances. A Lorca who recites poetry. Lorca as puppeteer. Lorca as a child. Lorca singing. A Lorca who imitates the dance of a fat old woman. Lorca strumming a guitar. A Lorca who dresses up as a priest. Lorca dressed up as a dead man…with a suit full of mothballs, with the hateful new shoes. And that's why, it might by why, when the poet dances barefoot he pretends he's dead, dead but alive…playfully.

The tree (part papier-mâché, part video), the combination swing-hangman's noose, the clay pot, the tightrope and the chair make up the Dali-inspired orchard which at first is only presented up close and where, by the shadow of the noose, Federico is floating. Then the reciter comes on, thanks to José Luis Ortiz Nuevo with his theater of death, his theater of the absurd. And right behind him, the cherub who sings of apples and sins. When Javier Barón returns to dance soleares, Manuel Soler beats out rhythms on a clay pot, the heartbeat of the dancer. And he does it brilliantly, for this man has exquisite taste.

Juan José Amador sings with his back to the audience, from behind the tree, the guitar sounds, Ortiz Nuevo recites…of death and of summertime…Soler dialogues on the cajón with Barón's feet, on the verge of being unshod and dancing naked to the reciter who closes the curtain, shadow play to bulerías, the cicada, Diego Carrasco. "Today is not a bulerías day…I'm tired of the fiestas, I want be all alone, alone with my poems". The fun turns into a problem, bulerías dresses up as taranto in order to escape, and shortly afterwards, it becomes tangos. And dance becomes poetry, knowing, feeling, being. The transistor brings the sound of country fandangos…and it's that Lorca, and that other one, and also the other, the toothless matchmaker who frills her skirts. Soler turns his hands into duende from within the jug. From outside the jug, Carrasco recites bulerías. Those who sing, dance; those who dance, play guitar; those who play guitar, sing. Each one enters the earthenware cave to emerge "a little more serious". Alegrías that inspires weeping, sung, spoken, recited, sketched, chewed…and the verse, the cry, the compás, and the music, and the feeling, and the game, and life, and dance, and death! Trantrán trabilitrán trantero. "And I act like such a fool, that even I am ashamed of myself, as old as I am."

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