Andres Marín's company to debut in Lyon, France
'Más allá del tiempo' [Beyond time] attempts to demonstrate
that "flamenco is a living art form"
Silvia Calado Olivo
La Maison de la Dance in the French city
of Lyon - a stage previously only touched by flamenco artists such as Antonio
Gades, Cristina Hoyos and Antonio Canales - is the venue Andrés Marín
has chosen for his company's debut between the 15th and the 19th of January, 2002.
With the first work 'Más allá del tiempo' [beyond time], the dancer
from Seville is trying to "communicate a feeling of seriousness, internalization
and respect" in order to demonstrate, unpretentiously, that "flamenco
is a living art form". The work, which previewed in Paris on January 11,
2002, includes dancers Adela Campallo and Ana Salazar with top billing, as well
as singers Pepe de Pura, José Anillo and Encarna Anillo and guitarists
Juan Antonio Suárez 'Canito' and Juan Requena.
After bringing his show 'Trilogía'
to half the world together with Rafael Campallo and Alejandro Granados, Andrés
Marín is now striking out on his own. The dancer from Seville has made
his own company with Adela Campallo and Ana Salazar, dancers with whom he gives
form to 'Más allá del tiempo', his first original work. Musically
directed by Andrés Marín himself, along with guitarists Juan Antonio
Suárez 'Canito' and Juan Requena, it is a show with no story line, made
up of five pieces that incorporate malagueñas and tientos tangos, soleá
por bulería, saeta, petenera and seguiriya.
Andrés Marín (Photo: Anahí Cármody)
The dancer's expressed goal with this
minimalist aesthetic is to "express the emotions of life through colors and
forgotten traditional verses set to musical arrangements", which leads to
touches of Gregorian chant, references to Argentine tango, or evocations of Seville's
Holy Week. To accomplish this the work is backed up by ten musicians and flamenco
singers. The flamenco guitar is accompanied by bass (Juan-Mi), clarinet (Javier
Trigo), accordion (Rafael Álvarez), percussion (Antonio Coronel) and viola
(Alejandro Garrido), "instruments which were chosen specifically for each
piece for the purpose of giving a particular character to each form".
The seguiriya, incorporated into the
number 'Silencio', is the centerpiece because, as Marín explains, "the
dance of seguiriya deals with the totality of flamenco expression, the contrasts
of life". He adds that in this form "you can find a perfect equilibrium
between pain and joy, sensuality and sobriety, weeping and jest". And he
elaborates that "the pain is in the cante, the joy in feeling it, the sensuality
is in the dance and the specific rhythm, the sobriety in the serious dancing,
the weeping is the guitar and the jest is found in the rhythm".
Betting on the future
The main theme of 'Más allá
del tiempo', which was produced by Arte & Movimiento Producciones and the
Junta de Andalucía's Consejería de Cultura is the "memory of
times past, transposed to the present, with a vision of the future, in order to
communicate everything that has been said in flamenco, all that remains, but recalling
it with today's idiom". Towards this end it attempts to be a "journey
through time to remind us of the legacy of artists who in their day were looking
to the future such as Nijinsky, Bartok, Lorca, Escudero, Stravinsky and Martha
Graham". With this in mind Andrés Marín will present his company's
first work between the 15th and the 19th of January at the French venue La Maison
de la Dance de Lyon, after a preview at Paris' Olympia Theater on January 11th.
