Flamenco and Fiction

Having a house guest has made my life busy this week; it also has sent me on adventures around Granada rather than sitting around on someone's sofa eating chocolate and immersing myself in the fictional lives of the characters on the American TV shows we watch on DVD.

Last night, I went to a flamenco show with my out of town guest, LL. The venue was cave-like, in one of the oldest areas of the city, and there were under 15 people in the audience, all perched on little stools. LL and I nursed our complimentary drinks and waited for the show to start. As we chatted about post-college life, I wondered what to expect from the performance. Most of my knowledge of flamenco came from television specials featuring dramatically made-up women, an Andalusian exchange student in high school, and a strange Lorca play I'd seen in DC.

When the artists came out, they weren't any different than the ordinary Spaniards I see on the street: a youngish man with dark spiked hair, skinny jeans, and sleek track shoes; a guitarist with hair tied back in a ponytail, a hoop earring in one ear. The performance was unpretentious, but the musicians were skilled and the music impressive, filling up the tiny room with elaborate finger-picked patterns, vocal trills, and nostalgic poetry that didn't strike me as so different from the dolorous tango lyrics I'd heard in Buenos Aires. Every time the music crescendoed suddenly, the British lady sitting next to me got a startled look on her face.

After the opening number, two other men (the rhythm section) and a young woman (the dancer) went to the stage, and the five of them arranged themselves to fit in the small space. The performance continued, now with intricate clapped, stomped, and snapped rhythms. The lyrics slid together into a string of sounds, but I could still interpret the emotion they expressed: raw, despairing, occasionally hopeful. I found myself staring at the faces of the performers: the dancer with her rigid, anguished expression; the guitarist, his face lit from time to time with a goofy, delighted smile; and the singer, his mouth in a perpetual smirk, his eyes fixed on the dancer. You know that expression: "eating someone up with your eyes"? Yeah, it was kind of like that. Despite the lack of rings on the appropriate fingers, I imagined that both were in committed relationships with other people, but were sleeping together.

After the show, I asked LL what she had thought of the performance, and whether she'd noticed the charge between the singer and dancer. She hadn't. I admitted that I wasn't sure what the narrative of flamenco is, whether that tension was part of the performance or the private lives of the performers, and she nodded, mumbling a polite response. We moved on to other topics.

Nevertheless, the impression has stuck with me, and I'm still thinking about those strangers on stage -- not my invented story, but that act of creation we take part in every day in every one of our interactions. It's the haziness between acting and reality, fiction and truth, following me around even when I'm not studying literature.