Feel the beat: Passion, innovation keep the heart of flamenco alive

BY JORDAN LEVIN

jlevin@MiamiHerald.com

When flamenco dancer Belén Maya is having a good night, when she is feeling the singer, feeling the music and, above all, feeling the moment, it takes her beyond her lifetime of training and everything she knows her superbly accomplished body can do.

''I feel the singer's voice inside,'' Maya says. ``I feel that this voice is my body, that what this voice does is the same thing that my body does. The voice is inside me and the voice moves me.''

That profound connection between singer, music, dancer and spirit is at the heart of flamenco, which will be celebrated in all its soulful glory at the Flamenco Festival at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts this week. It's a three-day feast featuring some of Spain's most acclaimed practitioners of this ancient art form.

''The most wonderful of all is when the art comes together, when the three elements unite,'' says Carmen Linares, one of Spain's most revered flamenco singers, who, together with her younger counterpart, Miguel Poveda, opens the festival Thursday night. ``The ideal is when something is produced between us, when we're really sharp and together, when I sing and transmit something special to the person who's dancing and to the guitarist, and this produces that communication that is duende, which is what we love.''

Flamenco's close-linked artistry stems from its roots as a communal jam session, or juerga -- people singing, playing and dancing together, spontaneously pouring out their emotions.

The professional flamenco artist-entertainer is a relatively recent phenomenon, which began in the 19th century. But flamenco started ''as a social event in the way that this is what people used to do when they got together -- they would sing and dance,'' says Miguel Marin, producer of the Flamenco Festival. ``It was really part of life.''

And so it included both celebration and sorrow. Flamenco evolved as the gypsies, who are believed to have come from around what is now northern India and Pakistan, traveled through the Middle East, northern Africa and Europe, absorbing musical and dance influences before arriving in southern Spain around the 15th century. The word gypsy, or gitano in Spanish, comes from Egyptano, or Egyptian -- although that label was probably a gypsy invention.

SHARING PAIN

Isolated by prejudice and repression, gypsies often were joined by other outsider groups, Jews and Moors, who added their own traditions. Flamenco became a way to share centuries of painful experience -- repression, betrayal, lost love, the insecurity and unfairness of life and fate -- knowing it would be understood in the most profound way.

Although flamenco dance is the most popular form outside of Spain, for the artists and those who really know the genre, the singer is the soulful core that drives and inspires flamenco.

''Flamenco singing can go deeper than any other music, with the possible exception of the blues, into the core of human sorrow,'' says Brook Zern, a flamenco expert and author who lives in New York and Spain. ``This is one of the maximum expressions of human feeling.''

Even as that communal tradition is disappearing with the advent of a more isolated, modern lifestyle in Spain, contemporary flamenco artists keep it alive.

''There is something in flamenco that carries that original spirit,'' says Marin. ``When you see this on stage, this comes across to the audience. This is the power of flamenco. It is an art form that is the result of sharing a lot of emotional experiences from people who are very different.''

This year the Flamenco Festival, which Marin has been presenting since 2000 and which has toured the United States, Europe and Asia, focuses on three major elements -- voice, guitar and dance -- and on combining different generations of artists.

Opening night on Thursday features, besides Linares and Poveda, guitarist Juan Carlos Romero and dancer Pastora Galván. The second night is Tomatito, who accompanied the legendary singer Camaron de la Isla for 18 years and is probably the most famous flamenco guitarist after Paco de Lucia. Tomatito, who will play with his quintet, has won several Latin Grammy awards for his solo work and his collaborations with jazz pianist Michel Camilo.

The final evening, titled Mujeres, stars three of the greatest dancers in flamenco, Merche Esmeralda, who is in her 50s (and about whom British critic Clement Crisp raved ``Had I every flower in London I would lay them at her stamping feet.''); Maya, 41, who has also been a choreographer and company director; and Rocío Molina, a 23-year-old prodigy known for her technical prowess and adventurousness in combining flamenco with other dance forms. The program is directed by Mario Maya, Belén Maya's father, a pioneer in extending flamenco dance into narrative and larger scale productions, and includes the flamenco-fusion singer Diana Navarro.

The festival also includes dance classes, parties and a photo exhibit and film series at the Centro Cultural Español in Coral Gables.

Beyond their considerable individual accomplishments, these artists are celebrated for pushing the boundaries of flamenco. They are fusing it with other styles, exploring narrative or dramatic themes and increasingly focusing on their own interests.

''What is happening today in flamenco is that what is moving the art form is the motivation of the artist,'' Marin says. Before, a singer might become famous for interpretation of certain song styles. But today's flamenco artists are increasingly using an accomplished technical base to take off on new creative flights.

''Before it was a much more closed art form,'' Marin says. ``That has been broken, now you don't need to be orthodox, you need to be yourself.''

Right now the creation process and creativity is really the center of the work of the artist.''

Says Zern: ``Before they were celebrated for the way they fulfilled the demands of tradition. Now they're celebrated for the way they change or violate the tradition -- if they do it brilliantly.''

For Tomatito, who has composed film scores and performed with artists as varied as Elton John and Chick Corea, it is compelling to explore new musical territory. ''It's another kind of heat,'' Tomatito said by telephone from his ranch in southern Spain. ``Because you have to learn music -- I don't know how to read music, so I have to listen to other records, learn other ways of playing. It's really interesting and a nice thing to learn ideas that are outside your world.''

MORE FREEDOM

Says Linares: ``This show we're doing, everything is very free. It's not like other concerts with dance where I have to follow the dance exactly. We have a lot more freedom.''

Flamenco aficionados can argue endlessly over how much flamenco can and should be changed.

''There are two questions -- one, is it good? And two, is it still flamenco?'' Zern says. ``Can this rubber band of flamenco be stretched infinitely, or can you go too far?''

For many artists, as long as they keep the essential spark of spontaneity and passion alive, you can go around the world.

''Flamenco is an art that comes out of the experience that you're living in the moment,'' Belén Maya says. ``The emotion you never repeat exactly. The singer with the guitarist and the dancer, all that creates a tension in the moment that has great power, which is the power of flamenco.''