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2005 JEREZ FESTIVAL.
MERCEDES RUIZ / BELÉN MAYA+RAFAELA CARRASCO
Inside. Out
Silvia Calado. Jerez, March 5th, 2005
‘Gestos de mujer’. Mercedes
Ruiz, Marco Flores: baile. Londro, David Palomar: cante.
Santiago Lara, Francisco Lara: guitar. Juanmi Guzmán:
contrabass. Paquito González, Pedro Navarro: percussion.
Javi Navarro: clapping. Villamarta Theater. 9 p.m. ‘Fuera
de los límites’. Belén Maya and
Rafaela Carrasco: baile and choreography. Ramón Oller:
stage design. Sala Compañía. 7 p.m. 2005 Jerez
Festival. Jerez (Cádiz, Spain), March 5th, 2005
Belén Maya (Photo:
Daniel Muñoz)
There are those who do flamenco dancing within the limits
set by tradition and there are those - they are a minority
- who decide to go beyond them. The ninth day of the 2005
Jerez Festival combined one with the other, showing that both
options are valid, as long as they are done with quality.
At the Villamarta Theater, Mercedes Ruiz put on her second
solo show ‘Gestos de mujer’, a well-measured and
sure series of flamenco bailes which dazzled the audience,
and rightly so. As experimentalists, Belén
Maya and Rafaela
Carrasco had to present ‘Fuera de los límites’
in the evening at Sala Compañía, a beautiful
exercise in freedom and dialogue that places flamenco dancing
in another galaxy.
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Mercedes Ruiz
(Photo: Daniel Muñoz) |
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Mercedes
Ruiz is a bailaora on the rise. Since she broke free from
Eva Yerbabuena a couple of years ago and began her own solo
career, she has matured slowly but surely. ‘Dibujos
en el aire’ and ‘Gestos de mujer’ are a
world apart. The new show is simple and slow-paced but has
stage awareness. Wardrobe, structure, transitions, lighting...
are well looked-after, set up to provide a meaningful framework
for the bailaora's work. Elegant, classical, virtuoso, balanced...
are some fitting adjectives to describe her. So she appeared
in the presentation through rondeña and verdiales where
she already conversed with her guest bailaor Marco Flores.
They already had the audience in their pocket beforehand due
to one being from Jerez and the other from Arcos, but there
was no shortage of merit to arouse their applause time and
time again. Though both are performers who compensate their
body and feet, the amount of acrobatics they can do is stunning.
Following the musical interlude came the alegrías,
which the bailaora performed old-style, slowly, sweetly, decked
out in a white dress with a train. A musical interlude to
introduce a taranto that ends up being a sensual baile through
tangos, with the beat marked by all the music. Next came the
bailaor's martinete, done cleanly with good stance. An ovation
for him. And so, warmed up, they lead into the final romance.
Of course, there was a grand finale and cheering from the
crowd.
Rafaela Carrasco
(Photo: Daniel Muñoz)
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That of Belén Maya and Rafaela Carrasco is quite another
story. They are the type that fly, that know no borders. They
have to be praised for that artistic courage but also for
being the only ones at this point in time who put aside individuality
in order to share a project fifty-fifty. They leave no-one
indifferent. The stage is a small planet of candles, dart-flowers
and giant carnations on which they display their respective
souls through baile. With a much-varied musical selection
- from guitar by Andrés Segovia to the Balkan voices
of Goran Bregovik, with Gerardo Núñez, Juan
Valderrama and Indian tablas in between, among thousands of
other sounds - they perform their own choreographies put together
based on flamenco, contemporary, world and freedom. The first
numbers have an abysmal depth. The silence rings, the stillness
balanced. Rafaela's danced poem, Belén's green dress
and bare feet in the seguiriya. Rafaela's square of light,
Belén's violet dress in a nymph baile. Rafaela's malagueña,
Belén's naked body and soul. Danced weeping. The Indian
tabla at Rafaela's feet, Belén's danced smile. All
of it leads to the dance for two ‘Lara y Croft’,
a brilliant divertissement which even includes techniques
from Thai boxing. Bodies release. They laugh. And the crowd,
caught up in it, nearly envies them for indulging in so much
freedom.
Foreigners
Macarena Ramírez
(Photo: Daniel Muñoz)
Estrella la Maltesa
(Photo: Daniel Muñoz)
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Hundreds of people coming from all
over the world turn Jerez into a colorful Tower of Babel
at this time of the year every year. They come from
Japan, Taiwan, the United States, South America, Germany,
Italy, Eastern Europe. And they all have in common a
disproportionate love for flamenco art. And there the
town's local daily newspaper goes and once again insults
the foreigners in an anonymous column; don't let them
believe flamenco is theirs, don't let them think that
by eating shrimp and noodles for a few days that they
can dance soleá. It's obviously wrong, but the
thing is that there's proof. And here comes Estrella
la Maltesa up on stage. Stelle came to Jerez on a flight
from Malta two years ago to do an elementary course
at the festival. It turns out that she fell in love
with flamenco dancing and a guitar. And she stayed.
She speaks not just Spanish, but jerezano (the local
dialect); outstandingly at that. But you really have
to see her dance soleá, the way several dozens
of people saw her do so at midnight at the jam-packed
La Jaima tea shop, accompanied on guitar, cante and
clapping by the crème de la crème of the
new generation of Jerez-born flamencos. Luis de Pacote,
Eva Rubichi, Luis de la Tota, Santiago Moreno and Antonio
Malena Jr., to be more specific. Estrella la Maltesa
danced tactfully, brilliantly, with a lot of guts, with
respect for the classical forms of Jerez; but above
all, she danced with love for flamenco art, that which
the anonymous pen-pushers of the town newspaper lack.
For them not to lose their cool, before the ‘foreigner’
danced, dancing alegrías was Macarena Ramírez,
a girl from Chiclana -also a pupil of María del
Mar Moreno's - to take your hat off to, to make a place
for at the top in the future and to make it clear that
enough of this being on the defense business; this never
ends... it just becomes more universa. |
magazine@flamenco-world.com
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