Special Feature. Festival
de Jerez 2008. Results, prizes and other matters
The festival of coexistence
S.C. Madrid, March 11th, 2008
Sunday, March 9th, 2008. 12:30
p.m. Train station. Jerez de la Frontera. Cádiz.
Spain. A Dutch woman and a Japanese woman converse in
rudimentary Spanish. “¡Muchas maletas! (A
lot of suitcases!)”. “Sí, mantón,
bata de cola, DVD, vídeo (Yeah, shawl, bata de
cola, DVD, video)”. “¿Cuántos
cursos tú? (You, how many courses?)”. “Matilde
Coral, mañana. Betanzos, tarde (Matilde Coral,
morning, Betanzos, afternoon)”. “Oh, mucho.
¿Una semana? (Oh, a lot. One week?)”. “Sí,
sí (Oh yeah)”, the Japanese woman answers,
smiling. The regional train is jam-packed which comes
from Cádiz to take them to Seville. And the baile
students and their bulky suitcases are squashed up in
the corridors of the train car. The long journey home
begins here... which is halfway around the world, in the
case of the Asian students.
Course. Festival
de Jerez 2008 (Photo Daniel Muñoz)
Like them, nearly a thousand people attended
Festival de Jerez 2008 to learn and perfect their knowledge
of flamenco dancing, by the hand of a selection of the
best maestros on the subject. The balance shows a total
of 36 courses
taught, with 900 places completely covered by students
coming from 35 countries. As you could sense on the train,
the Japanese continue to be the most numerous - 15 percent
in total - followed by the Germans, French, North Americans,
Spanish and Italians. And the thing is that for two weeks,
the hospitable city of Cádiz has been a genuine
Tower of Babel, a meeting point for languages, colors
and cultures, with a common denominator: flamenco.
But at this festival it isn’t just
about catching steps and bits of choreographies, but also
checking out directly how today’s pros put into
practice and understand flamenco dancing. And that’s
possible because in the price of registering for a course
(from 285 to 325 euros, according to the level), tickets
for the Teatro Villamarta are included. A bargain which
in passing guarantees an extensive audience every night.
At this venue, the city’s main one since it was
built in the 1920s, the most radical variety of large-scale
shows has been exhibited in this twelfth edition.
Capullo de Jerez, Andrés
Marín, Marco Vargas and Chloé Brûle
(Photo Daniel Muñoz)
Female baile with a capital “F”
by stars of the genre such as Merche Esmeralda, Manuela
Carrasco, Eva
Yerbabuena, Isabel Bayón. Innovation grasping
the roots by means of ground-breaking shows like ‘Flamenco
XXI’ by Dospormedio & Cía., ‘El
final de este estado de cosas’ by Israel Galván,
and ‘El alba del último día’
by Andrés Marín. Shows for the greater public
such as ‘Tiempo muerto’ by Rafael Amargo and
‘Sangre’ by Nuevo Ballet Español. And
stress on the baile and cante of the land through shows
like ‘¡Viva
Jerez!’ (the first production of its own tackled
by the festival) with Fernando Terremoto, María
del Mar Moreno and Mercedes Ruiz as stars; ‘Puertas
adentro’ by Antonio el Pipa and ‘Sin frontera’
by Miguel Poveda.
And regarding the offer of artists, festival
director Francisco López has already drawn conclusions.
“We continue to be the showcase for everything arising
in flamenco. Mature shows of the most diverse trends have
been presented”, he affirmed. In his opinion, the
evolution of the event runs parallel “to the development
of artists and companies”, so that for professionals
it isn’t just “a goal to reach, but to surpass
for upcoming editions”. “I believe in continuous
efforts, beyond the inherent novelty of every premiere”,
he pointed out. To López, all of it has consolidated
a cultural project that still needs “greater involvement
by the city”.
But year after year, you can see how
the festival is contagious in the city. Shop windows are
decked out in wardrobe and accessories for baile, there
are restaurants which offer special ‘flamenco festival’
meals, the staff of taverns near the theater such as La
Reja are reinforced for the marathon of wines and ‘montaítos’
(hors d’oeuvres) – with names as intercultural
as ‘noruego’ (‘Norwegian’), ‘italiano’
(‘Italian’), ‘madrileño’
(‘Madrilenian’) - every night, the late night
‘after’ route becomes a triangle with the
opening of Diego
Carrasco’s joint in Santiago: Arriate-Colmao-Diego,
the academies offer students alternative courses and extra
places, the newsstand at Plaza del Villamarta extends
its complete offer of the press to flamenco books and
records...
Ángel Muñoz's
course. Awarding of certificates
(Photo Daniel Muñoz)
The festival’s prizes
And even the outstanding Bar Juanito,
which pampers the stomachs of all sorts of festival-goers
with delicacies such as its famous artichokes and replenishing
cabbage, gets fully involved by promoting a new prize
together with ‘Diario de Jerez’ for the best
revelation show. The jury, consisting of journalists from
sixteen local, national and international media, decided
by majority to give the Festival de Jerez 2008 Revelation
Prize to Dospormedio & Cía. for their show
‘Flamenco
XXI’. The new award joins the two existing ones.
That of the critics, promoted by the Flamencology Institute
of Jerez, went to the show ‘Mujeres’,
starring Merche Esmeralda, Belén Maya and Rocío
Molina. And the People’s Prize on this occasion
was given to Miguel Poveda for ‘Sin
Frontera’. This award is also an initiative
of ‘Diario de Jerez’, whose team puts together
every day a full-color booklet about the festival worthy
of collecting, which gives the audience the chance to
evaluate the shows on a scale of 1 to 10 at the theater
exit. If everyone had voted at every stage, a total of
34,000 ballots would have been collected, which is the
number of spectators the organization has counted in its
official results. And that means 6.7 percent more than
in the previous edition, with an average occupancy of
92 percent in the 127 scheduled activities.
Nani Paños and Rafael
Estévez, Dospormedio & Cía,
Revelation Prize winner (Foto Daniel Muñoz)
And the thing is that there aren’t
just baile courses and big shows at the Teatro Villamarta.
The show has occupied 20 different areas of the city,
among them, the Palacio de Villavicencio (with the cante
series ‘Los conciertos de Palacio’), González
Byass’s Bodega Los Apóstoles (headquarters
of the music fusion, guitar and cante shows), Sala Compañía
(where four baile series were staged), Bodega San Ginés
(the noon setting of the circles called ‘Las tertulias
de la Bodega’), as well as the flamenco peñas
for late nights and different classrooms... By the way,
the demand for places is so great that wine bars, gyms
and peñas have to be reconverted into classrooms
with their floor and their mirrors.
The growth of Festival de Jerez has been
reported every year by Flamenco-world.com, which as a
collaborating medium, has doubled its efforts to showcase
the event internationally. During this twelfth edition,
held from February 22nd to March 8th, 2008, the counters
at the website registered nearly 3 million pages seen
per day and nearly half a million unique visits. There
is accessing from all over the globe, but especially from
the United States, Spain, Europe, Latin America, Japan
and China. And that reflects the parallelism between the
festival and the website. Moreover, in this edition, new
informative initiatives have been started such as the
continuous Festival de Jerez information bulletin, which
already has over a thousand subscriptions of every nationality.
It isn’t strange to find statements by course-goers
interviewed by the local newspaper affirming that they
found out on the Internet that the festival existed. But
what they all coincide on is pointing out how wonderful
they think the festival is and the ambience there is in
the city. And the thing is, as Miguel
Poveda said to ‘Diario de Jerez’, “people
coexist here in a really special way”.
Miguel Poveda (Photo Daniel
Muñoz)
