Programme Notes
EVA LA YERBABUENA
Flamenco artists' search for a coherent personal style has always set the pace in a musical form that has been evolving constantly since it emerged at the end of the 18th century. Today's younger artists have broadened that search as a response to hearing new forms of music and learning virtuoso technique unknown to earlier generations. But few of them have succeeded in using these new influences to add resonance to flamenco's emotional depths. It is in this sense that dancer Eva la Yerbabuena and guitarist Vicente Amigo are outstanding figures of their generation.
La Yerbabuena, who grew up and began her flamenco training in Granada, is considered the most important representative of women's flamenco today. Her passionate commitment to flamenco's traditional values informs her technically stunning and powerfully emotional dance language, but at the same time she looks to other art forms to find inspiration. She has worked with film maker Mike Figgis, theatre director Hansel Cereza and Fura del Baus, and contemporary dancers Pina Bausch and Carolyn Carlson. Her artistic partnership with her husband Paco Jarana, guitarist and composer of all the music in her shows, is also fundamental to her work.
'Eva' was premiered at the Seville Biennal of 1998 and is considered one of the most significant flamenco shows in performance today. Perfectly integrating song, music and dance, it takes the audience on an abstract journey through some of flamenco's most important song-styles, respecting each artist's individual style and leaving space for improvisation. At the same time La Yerbabuena uses the different song-styles' emotional moods to present her vision of women's changing identity within flamenco.
Conceived as the waking dream of a bailaora, or flamenco dancer, the dream opens with haunting early acapella song-forms from rural Andalusia and the Gypsy forges. They are followed by Jerez de la Frontera's traditional bulerías, fiesta songs and dances in which guitar and palmas (clapping) set the complex fast rhythms. Eva's first solo is a granaina, created by her for this lyrical song-style to express the trapped emotions of a woman bound by traditional feminity. Here she also plays with the graceful language of early women's flamenco, dancing with a train and an emphasis on movement from the waist up. Her next long solo explores one of flamenco's most essential forms, the soleá: the tension gathers through moments of suffering, withdrawal, loneliness, dignity and volcanic anger in a woman's search for independence at any cost. Musically, this is also a masterly anthology of the soleá's many different stylistic variants from around Andalucia. The charged atmosphere is broken by pure rhythm - a percussion solo - before the entire company performs tangos, one of flamenco's oldest styles, given a modern gloss of free movement and zapateo footwork to parallel a sense of emotional release and satisfaction. Here, in the contemporary world, the dream ends, and the dancer returns to her sleep and the mysteries of the future.
Eva brings with her outstanding singers and musicians: Enrique Soto and David Lago, both from Jerez, and Segundo Falcón from Seville, known in their own right as superb cantaores (flamenco singers); guitarists Paco Jarana and Salvador Guitérrez, from Don Hermanas, near Seville; and percussionist Antonio Coronel and flautist Ignacio Vidaechea. In January the musicians and Andalucian dancers in the company were awarded the Premio de la Critica (Critics' Prize) for the best company of 2000.
VICENTE AMIGO
Vicente Amigo's first solo album 'De Mi Corazón al Aire' [From My Heart to the Air], released in 1991, established him as the leading flamenco guitarist of the generation whose work took up Paco de Lucía's and Manolo Sanlúcar's revolutionary introduction of harmony and melody. Amigo's highly expressive playing is marked out by its rhythmic and melodic subtlety, a measured sense of composition, lightningly fast fingerwork and ,above all, gentle emotional depths. His experience as a producer, lyricist and accompanist - working live with El Pelé and Enrique Morente among others, and in the recording studio with Camarón de la Isla and José Mercé - has fed back into his solo compositions, which weave in different voices and musical influences, but always drawn into an inimitably flamenco sound. His admiration for the great jazz musicians can be heard on his second album 'Vivencias Imaginadas' [Imagined Experiences], 1995, on which Paco de Lucía joined him in a duet dedicated to Pat Metheny. On his new album 'Ciudad de las Ideas' [City of Ideas] his love for Latin music can be heard in the lyrical bolero dedicated to his baby son. He has explored the possibilities of strings, of wind instruments and, most recently, as in this show, of percussion. At the same time his performances are still punctuated by his solo compositions, such as the new album's masterly soleá inspired by Cordoba, his adopted native city. In these solos he reveals his deep understanding of flamenco's traditional musical structures and his rare ability to express its darker emotions.
Vicente's line-up includes long-time collaborator José Manuel Hierro, the Cordoban guitarist who has composed and performed alongside Amigo for many years; Barcelona-based singer Blás Córdoba, whose broken, silvery flamenco voice shifts easily between traditional and contemporary sounds; and bassist Antonio Ramos, also known a Maca, who has worked with jazz, rock and flamenco artists such as Ketama and Tomatito. He also brings with him Tino di Geraldo, one of flamenco's most creative percussionists, best known internationally for his work with Paco de Lucía; box player Cesar Moreno and percussionist Patricio Camara.
Vicky Hayward
