XII FLAMENCO FESTIVAL DE BERLÍN

Text & photos: Estela Zatania
Cover Photo : Gijsbert Copier

When everyone in Spain is deeply into their summer holidays, here we are in Berlin for the twelfth edition of the city’s Flamenco Festival, a little-known event outside Germany, but which turns out to be cooking on high heat. Over a period of nine days the scheduled program includes more than thirty performers, in addition to dance, guitar and cante courses.

Antonio Moya	Fabiola Pérez

Other large-scale festivals go in for the most extravagant shows which become more and more distanced from the flamenco aesthetic and look suspiciously like Hollywood extravaganzas. The organizers of the Berlin festival however, had the good taste to put together a sampling of flamenco in all its richness and with a minimum of window-dressing. At a press conference artistic director Michael Schuldt emphasized that the heart and soul of the festival would be “emotion”, and insisted on the grassroots nature of flamenco, while pointing out that it may accomodate certain outside influences when incorporated tastefully and with intelligence.

Flamenco cooking on high heat

Young artists who continue to resist the urge to sell out, and who defend the kind of flamenco they know and love, offered an evening of surprising quality on Wednesday night. Shows here begin at the very unflamenco hour of half past seven, in broad daylight; the nights are chilly in Berlin, and people retire earlier than in Spain. Tonight the venue is a sort of beer garden with large trees and the relaxed atmosphere of your typical cante festival in Andalucía. There’s a long winding line of people at the entrance who file in to occupy countless rows of benches. It’s a diversified middle-class group of people, mostly between 25 and 45 approximately. Over the loudspeaker, Cigala’s versión of “La Bien Pagá” is playing while a sound technician checks the mikes for palmas and knuckle raps on the table, and a thick grey cloud looms overhead.

Leonor Leal	Javier Rivera, Tino van der Sman

When singer Javier Rivera opens, accompanied by Dutch guitarist resident in Seville, Tino van der Sman, with an updated version of the caña, drops begin to fall and a thousand plastics and umbrellas materialize from audience members who have come to experience that “emotion” the organizers hope to bring about. Javier’s singing is dignified, beyond his years, and Tino backs him up with a style that is just modern enough. Despite the rain, the audience’s complicity is total. The cantaor thanks them and dedicates his performance to “all the people from our country who have come here to make a living”, ending with malagueñas and alegrías.

An authentic old-style “festero”

Next, Antonio Moya lends his dynamic guitar-playing to Fabiola Pérez, a beautiful, elegant and very flamenco singer. The rain, which had abated, returns more aggressively, and again, umbrellas blossom At this point I begin to notice the quality of the amplification; in Spain terrible sound all too often plagues these events. Tientos tangos and bulerías to wrap everything up, and the singer apologizes for the rain.

Javier Heredia

The Berlin audience then has the pleasure, harder and harder to enjoy these days, of seeing an authentic old-style “festero”. Drawing from maestros like Paco Valdepeñas, Anzonini, Mono de Jerez, Miguel Funi and Marsellés, Javier Heredia is the youngest exponent of this endangered artform. He sings bulerías remembering Gaspar de Utrer among others, and his delightfully understated dance reflects Miguel Funi, but Heredia has his own personality. The audience response is enthusiastic to say the least, leaving no doubt as to the universality of Javier’s message.

In the second part, dance takes center stage in the person of Leonor Leal, a highly competent seasoned professional who has worked with María Pagés, Eva Yerbabuena and Andrés Marín. After her long alegrías, a fiesta finale gets the audience to their feet for a lengthy ovation. And as if all that weren’t enough, a little lecture-demo about flamenco was offered in the pub within the garden, and then, what you see all too seldom in Spain these days: the artists got together for an open-ended afterhours fiesta that showed little sign of breaking up when yours truly left at five in the morning.

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