 Manuel Liñán “Tauro”
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Text: Estela Zatania TRIP TO GRANADA, ALL INCLUDED Dance, director and choreography: Manuel Liñán, Guadalupe Torres, Vanesa Coloma, Cristián Martín. Cante: Inmaculada Rivero, Mercedes Cortés, Matías López “El Mati”. Guitar: Antonia Jiménez, Luis Mariano. I often hear comments from people who attend the Festival de Jerez, to the effect that the program ought to include more artists from outside the city. In fact, this year’s program included only six days without someone from Jerez as principal artist. But if last Sunday was the day of Málaga, on Wednesday night the Granada people arrived in a whirl of art and flamenco, with a decidedly different flavor.
Just one week ago Marco Flores, Liñán’s artistic partner in works previously presented in this festival, enjoyed a smashing success with his company that was a tough act to follow, but Liñán rose to the challenge with this ambitious work. Six carefully constructed scenes make up this work whose title reflects Manuel Liñán’s astrological sign. The first, “Madre Tierra”, opens with the temporeras of Montefrío, different from the ones we hear in the area of Jerez and Lebrija, evocative and well-sung by Matías López “El Mati” who does a fine job throughout the show. The four dancers move to the mysterious sound of these unaccompanied cantes, a daring innovation that could easily have failed, but which came off well thanks to good taste in the choreography. “Entre las Cuerdas” is a fascinating choreography dominated by six long strips of fabric that hang from the ceiling, and which are manipulated, moved, stretched and danced by Guadalupe Torres, Vanesa Coloma and Cristián Martín to the lovely elegant music of granaína as interpreted by Luis Mariano. Manuel Liñán’s taranto finishes with an assortment of tangos, ending so powerfully you wonder what can possibly be coming in the rest of the show to top this. But Liñán returns almost immediately to dance a duet with Martín, opening a sort of abandolao suite with bulerías compás just beneath the surface. Mercedes Cortés sings granaína without guitar, making the transition to soleá por bulería and romance danced by Liñán with many novel ideas, and never straying from flamenco, including knee-drops in the style of José Greco, something we haven’t seen in decades. Bravely alone, without accompaniment of any kind, Inma Rivero belts out “Cautiva”, a song based on a legend about one of the towers of the Alhambra, to open the last scene titled “Elegí a Granada”, a celebration without apologies of Granada’s pluralistic culture. For once, it wasn’t Lorca, but the ingenuous melodies of the cachucha, the tanguillo de la flor, the mosca and the soleá de Arcas, straddling both flamenco and folklore, evoking María la Canastera, Manolo Amaya and the musical richness of this city. The caves of Sacromonte do not deserve the bad press they routinely get. A fiesta finale of comic tangos, and it’s really a shame there were so many empty seats – the narrow-minded people who abstained missed out on a nearly perfect work of art from a dancer whose time has come.
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