Special Features. Antonio Canales's musings

Carmen Amaya, supreme beauty

Antonio Canales. Seville, December 2002
Translation: Gary Cook

Yesterday I watched Carmen Amaya dancing in two glorious black and white short films: 'El embrujo del fandango' and 'Danzas gitanas'. Such heavenly splendor, such composure and purity in her movements! You have to be in supreme physical condition to move in that way. And that's how we should live, putting our whole life and soul into everything we do, as if we could die at any moment - giving all we've got. (To tell the truth, dying and living are one and the same if we stop to think - every instant is just as important as the next.) Carmen Amaya has everything one might need to fully embrace respiration. That bodily strength, supple as a bulrush, that whirlwind of power, that solitude... she must have felt such a stranger to this world. A supreme beauty, comparable to no-one, she is herself, Carmen Amaya, now and until the end of time.

	Carmen Amaya and her brother Paco, Sabicas, Manuel García Matos and the manager larking about during a tour around EEUU (50's).

And in spite of all that might have distracted her (the pain, the anguish, all manner of problems which she may or may not have suffered), she maintains her focus with a wondrous joy. How can she do it? Because she's not from this world; or if she is, she should be considered something far greater - to do what she does she must have embraced everything it had to offer before she slipped away into the great beyond. She is the personification of duende, one of the most magical figures there has been, someone who dances mesmerized in a euphoric trance, and who now lies in a state of grace comparable to that of San Juan de la Cruz "forgotten among the lilies". Beautiful, beautiful, this genius of dance. Those eyes which now shine in the eternity, blinded from simultaneously seeing and not seeing, inebriated without knowing why, since they crave water but can find no well from which at last to quench that thirst. ("For I know well the spring that flows and runs, although it is night..."). They glimmer with true ecstasy, inviting us to soar into the skies. She dies but does not relinquish, she is like a Phoenix in mid-annihilation, dying and being reborn on the pyre, where she burns but is never destroyed.

And I think that she dances, too, from the heart, not from the stomach, nor any part of the body that fills and empties. It is the flow of blood, filling the moment, flooding the memory, seeping into space like a shooting star. And - Lord above - watch how she moves and tenses the muscles of her legs! That is a true lesson in eroticism of the utmost refinement. You can hardly believe your eyes...

See what I mean? I suppose that to her questions of fame, applause, and those things were important. After all, they're your audience's recognition, and they allowed her to earn a living from her artistry, instead of having to slave away doing something else. But in the end I don't think they were vital. She dances without ever switching off, just dances, because she has baile in her blood or somewhere deep within, perhaps in the deepest recesses of her soul…

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