The best festivals take audiences into realms they never have encountered before.
By that measure, Flamenco 2005–a citywide event unfolding in auditoriums large and small, chic and gritty–has vaulted to the higher ranks of Chicago’s ever-expanding list of culture fests.
Short of traveling to Spain, in fact, one would be hard-pressed to see and hear so many worthy flamenco artists within a span of just a few weeks. Better still, the performers who have traveled here represent the pinnacle of the art form, at least judging by the festival’s initial concerts.
Though last month’s festival opener offered a return visit from Antonio Alvarez “Pitingo”–who made his American debut during last year’s event–this week the festival pushed boldly into new territory, with two significant Chicago premieres. Both pointed to the remarkable vitality of flamenco, an age-old art that, like jazz, seems capable of constantly reinventing itself for changing tastes and times, even as it clings to certain core traditions.
If the festival had offered nothing more than Tuesday night’s concert at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport Ave., flamenco devotees would have given deep thanks to the Instituto Cervantes de Chicago and the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, which organized Flamenco 2005. For the performance by dancer Belen Maya, singer Mayte Martin and a corps of instrumentalists proved at once revelatory and charismatic, aesthetically innovative and technically brilliant.
Not since pianist Diego Amador made his American debut with a genre-defying concert during last year’s festival, in fact, has a performance shed so much light on the meaning and malleability of flamenco.
The evening opened austerely, with singer Martin and dancer Maya alone on a darkened stage, two beams of soft white light trained upon them. While Martin unspooled plaintive melody lines, Maya danced and swayed and swirled around her, accenting beats with staccato clicks of her heels.
Before long, the duo was joined by two palmeros–or hand-clappers–who punctuated the ritual dance with distinctively Iberian rhythms. Two guitarists enriched the texture of this music, while a violinist eventually appeared to add a silken counterpoint to Martin’s sinuous vocals.
To hear, all at once, Martin’s gloriously imploring voice, the palmeros’ crisply syncopated rhythms, the guitarists’ lushly arpeggiated chords and the violinist’s exquisitely legato lines was to revel in the lush colors and tautly measured rhythms of prototypical flamenco. More sonorous than an instrumental soloist yet not so dense as a full orchestral statement, this chamber-size group represented flamenco music in nearly ideal dimension.
Much of the credit belonged to guitarists Juan Ramon Caro and Jose Luis Monton, who offered the virtuosity of the best flamenco players, without the ostentation often associated with star soloists. For all their fleet technique, the duo measured every chord and gauged every sound to serve the greater good of the larger ensemble.
At the eye of the storm stood Maya, a dancer who dared to merge classic flamenco gestures with decidedly more contemporary shrugs of the shoulder or waves of the hands. Standing ramrod straight–like a vintage flamenco artist–at one moment, slip-sliding across the stage like a modern-day dancer the next, Maya brought the art form unflinchingly into the 21st Century. Even if she had been alone onstage, without a note of music to accompany her, it would have been impossible to take one’s eyes off of her.
Here’s hoping this group returns next year. Once was not enough.
On Wednesday evening, the more soft-spoken duo of singer Arcangel and guitarist Alfredo Lagos performed before a standing-room-only crowd in Preston Bradley Hall of the Chicago Cultural Center. For the most part, Arcangel drove the proceedings, his ability to bend pitches and articulate complex turns and trills while sustaining a long melodic line representing the work of a top-notch singer, regardless of genre.
Little wonder so many in the audience shouted their approval. They know inventive flamenco singing when they hear it.
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Flamenco 2005 continues with Juan Manuel Canizares, 8 p.m. Friday at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave.; $24; 773-728-6000. Enrique Morente and Tomatito perform at 8 p.m. Monday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; $20-$59; 312-294-3000.
