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Cante, guitar: Diego Carrasco. Guitar: Moraíto Chico. Baile: Pastora Galván. The Band, Guitar: Curro Carrasco. Percussion: Juan Grande, Curro Carrasco. Bass: Ignacio Cintado. Las Peligro (voice and palmas): Carmen Amaya, Joaquina Amaya. Director: Pepa Gamboa. Presentation conference: Estela Zatania Text: Estela Zatania Nowadays, with the global love-affair with flamenco that shows no signs of abating, it’s odd to arrive at second edition of the Dutch Bienal de Flamenco and discover that names like Diego Carrasco and Moraíto ring no bells with flamenco fans. More complicated still, is the somewhat negative concept of many Dutch people of flamenco as a tacky tourist genre, the polkadots and tambourine syndrome we struggle to shed day after day.
In this perspective, Carrasco had come to be seen and to conquer, because that was his destiny in this festival whose explicit aim is to foment the opening-up of flamenco in all its manifestations. After the presentation conference, which served to highlight the importance of Jerez flamenco, Diego Carrasco got underway with a reincarnation of the show he debuted last month at Seville’s Bienal de Flamenco, “El Tiempo y el Diablo”. If on that occasion the “devil” was the unmistakable off-stage voice of Manuel Moreno “Moraíto Chico”, tonight we were able to enjoy the actual person and his guitar. In fact, the loose pretext of the original work all but disappeared, and we were given a laidback informal recital in the pure Diego Carrasco style, his best-loved songs, his pranks, his guitar, and of course, above everything else, his limitlessly expansive flamenco personality. The desire to savour, to open the floodgates of the mind and understand is palpable The Dutch audience, who had already assimilated the carefully orchestrated television preview, received the man from Santiago with an extremely warm ovation. “Debajo de la Hoja de la Lechuga”, so Lorca and so flamenco when passed through bulerías with the voice and guitar of Diego Carrasco. The people react, the desire to savour, to open the floodgates of the mind and understand is palpable. Suddenly it occurs to me that this multicultural upper middle-class audience is prepared to accept this artist as a sort of Andalusian version of Willie Nelson.
Moraíto makes a cute entrance, half dancing half bopping with his guitar, and another heartfelt ovation springs spontaneously from the audience, even before the guitar solo of bulería por solelá he interprets. Another guest artist, and it was a great idea to have her on board, was the great dancer Pastora Galván. With a red bata de cola, and plenty of temperament, the attractive young woman offered a non-stop display of the most traditional flamenco moves, distilled, galvanized and reinterpreted for the twenty-first century, for an audience that couldn’t get enough. Another of Moraíto’s guitar solos, this time, his well-known tangos, but here, nothing of his is “well-known”, so the effusive audience reaction is pure and genuine. An abbreviated version of “Alfileres de Colores”, then the Peligros sing, Pastora Galván returns for the fiesta finale of a fiesta that really has no finale, and as of this moment flamenco has some new followers who years hence will remember this night as the beginning of their addition to the art-form.
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