Homegrown flamenco group brings performers into a spicy musical salsa

ROSEMARY PONNEKANTI

Take a Cuban dancer with fierce black eyes. Add a ballet-trained blonde and brunette. Give them some music by a guitarist from Maple Valley, a deep-throated Indian classical singer and a jazz vocalist. What you get is Tacoma Flamenca, a flamenco group whose dancers have been teaching and performing with local studios for years, but who are now getting out into the cafe scene. Specifically, the Mandolin Café, in a show Saturday night the group hopes will become a regular event.

The performers’ diverse backgrounds create a spicy mix of original and traditional flamenco.

“Flamenco is still very traditional,” says Marisela Fleites, a Spanish literature professor from Cuba who has taught and performed flamenco with Washington Contemporary Ballet and MetroParks for years. “But every art form evolves – there’s a lot of fusion in Spain with flamenco and jazz, flamenco and Indian music ... ballet and modern dance enrich the slow, lyric parts. There’s a lot of debate in Spain as to what (exactly) is flamenco.”

Fleites and her colleagues are adding to the debate in their own way. Two singers from different musical backgrounds combine with two other ballet-trained dancers in choreography by Fleites that ranges from folk to athletic leaps.

As they rehearse in the WCB studio, Fleites joins fellow dancers Angela Brandenburg and Julie Rector in a trio pulsing in and out of a circle. It’s a fairground dance, set steps in a folk tradition, rather than the complex footwork of the solos. Fleites, with short black hair and black toreador-style pants and shirt, contrasts with the blonde Brandenburg and brunette Rector in their flouncy skirts and shawls.

They flow through the program: intimate vocal folk songs, duets as symmetrical and poised as tango, a highly foot-percussive duet with Fleites drumming on the box cajon, solos with balletic pirouettes and expressive, curling arms.

When they take it to the Mandolin Saturday in a by-donation, all-ages show, they’ll be moving the piano for more space, though it will still be far more intimate than a theater performance. The cafe will offer a special menu of Cuban and Spanish tapas, soups, sangria and more, while Fleites, inspired by an audience “asking question after question” at the group’s last WCB show, will be introducing each piece to explain the style.

“The performance is educational – we cover a broad sweep of all the different rhythms of Spain,” Fleites explains.

But Tacoma Flamenca goes way beyond Spain in musical influences. While Brandenburg (a former WCB ballet mistress) and Rector have both danced with Fleites for eight years and teach flamenco themselves, the two singers come from very different backgrounds. Seema Bahl was trained in Indian classical singing, and her sultry, powerful alto floats over the ornaments with both emotion and agility. She’s also studied flamenco dance and the traditions of Spanish gypsies.

“Some of the older songs call on the training I had in Indian music,” Bahl explains. “Flamenco was actually brought from India originally by the gypsies, and the two traditions share things like melismas and unusual tonalities.”

Next to Bahl is Marena Lear, Fleites’ daughter and an established jazz singer whose mother convinced her to come back, at least for this group, to flamenco. Her liquid mezzo-soprano has occasional traces of jazz inflections, especially on high notes. John Bussoletti is the final member – a flamenco veteran of 33 years, he lives in Maple Valley and plays with some of Seattle’s best groups.

For Fleites, dancing flamenco is all about cultural history: “The gypsies created flamenco out of rebellion. It’s very sad, expressing the hardships of life through rhythm. You have to get into that mindset.”

But for those outside Spanish culture, learning flamenco can be a challenge.

“I still find it difficult to grasp the rhythms of all the palos (measure counts),” says Brandenburg. “You have to really get to know that and see it in play with the singer and guitarist. It’s a language you have to learn.” Add to that the sheer strength and control of the footwork, expressing those rhythms in syncopation with the guitar, says Rector, and you have a dance form that you’re always learning.

For Bussoletti, though, flamenco can be summed up in one word: the Spanish ‘sentir,’ to feel.

“The whole aim of flamenco is to communicate a feeling,” he says.

rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com
Read more: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/08/26/1796174/feeling-driven-flamenco.html#ixzz1WL3r5hHl