Women take center stage this autumn
in Central Europe

Juana Amaya, La Macanita, Aurora Vargas and Esperanza Fernández give performances between October and December in France and Belgium

Carmen Jiménez, October 2003

Women and flamenco are in the spotlight this fall on Central European stages. Bailaoras Juana Amaya and Concha Vargas, and cantaoras La Macanita, Aurora Vargas and Mariana Cornejo take part in a traveling flamenco festival which stops in Brussels and several French cities between October 25th and December 6th 2003. Esperanza Fernández kicks off with a new show at Paris's Cirque d'Hiver.

Juana Amaya (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

he first round of performances in the mobile Belgian-French festival will be held from October 25th to 27th at the Palais de Beaux-Arts in the Belgian capital, with two shows. The first, under the title 'Flamencas', brings together three cantaoras: Aurora Vargas from Seville, La Macanita from Jerez, and Mariana Cornejo from Cadiz. This elite band of vocalists will make way two days later for bailaora Juana Amaya from Morón, offering a fine display of her talents in her show 'Yo misma', highly acclaimed at Seville's Festival Bienal de Flamenco, and based around a careful selection of soleá pieces.

In December it will be Concha Vargas's turn to light the flamenco torch on a selection of French stages. This tour will pass through the French towns of Savigny-le-Temple and Villeneuve d'Ascq, on December 5th and 6th respectively. With these concerts the dancer from Lebrija in Seville province rounds off a season of incessant touring that began last year in Sweden where she was given the honorary title 'Gran Dama Gitana del Baile Flamenco', later passing through other countries such as Italy and the U.S.

Cirque d'Hiver

Aurora Vargas (Photo: Javier Hurtado)

The warm-up to these performances will be provided in Paris by Esperanza Fernández, in the shape of her new production. The vocalist from Seville will perform from October 2nd to 4th as part of the Festival Île de France, held at the prestigious Cirque d'Hiver, where Camarón de la Isla gave a concert in 1988, to be later immortalized on the DVD 'París 87/88 Camarón'. She'll be accompanied, aside from her usual collaborators, by guitarist Miguel Ángel Cortés and by Miguel Vargas and Luis Peña on 'palmas', Arab musicians Suhail Serghini on vocals and lute, and Abdesalam Naïti on kannun. After this appearance before audiences in the French capital, she returns to the series of concerts she is giving in Italy, with Manuel de Falla's 'El amor brujo' and 'Siete canciones españolas'.

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