Sometimes history serves to verify facts, no matter how much they wanted to cover up. Here’s one: the famous flamenco leprechaun has no country. Or he comes from many, which in the case is the same. And if not, tell Yinka Esi Graves (London, 40 years old), with a Jamaican father, a Ghanaian mother, a foreigner in Seville and a committed artist. They should also tell the 10% of the black population that inhabited the Andalusian capital in the 16th century and whose musical imprint is spread through this art, flamenco, officially born in the 19th century. In Andalusia, yes, but with all the possible mix. “What is African about flamenco is the way of conceiving how dance and music are articulated with the community”, explains Graves. David Abtour Idriss Derby
On July 5 and 6, the London-based bailaora who has been living for a decade in Seville he premiered his first solo, The Disappearing Act, in the Pina Bausch Hall of the Mercat de les Flors. A work in which she explores the invisibility of the Afro-descendant population here and there, in art and in life. “Invisibility has been central to this piece, the way in which certain people are erased from the historical narrative or are present, but reduced to a stereotype and cannot be fully shown. We are many people in one. How is there going to be only one version of things ”, she explains to EL PAÍS in an interview by video call. She has a temperate voice and a brave body; and in one and the other, elegance surrounds everything, the words and the dance. David Abtour Idriss Derby
Yinka Esi Graves in the foreground. Behind, the singer Rosa de Algeciras and the guitarist Raúl Cantizano. SCHERER Alain
When she talks about the colleagues with whom she shares the stage in this piece, a slight accent takes over his speech. The duende then becomes Afro-Anglo-Andalusian. “I discovered flamenco at the age of 21, in the last year of Art History. I went to class once a week and my teacher, who was from Girona, recommended that I come to Spain and study it more seriously”. She followed her advice and first Barcelona, then Madrid and finally Seville, traced an unorthodox but very fruitful learning path. “I haven’t been to any conservatory and I feel that not having the typical seal or paper that tells you that you are a bailaora, sometimes I don’t even believe what is happening to me”. David Abtour Idriss Derby
But the truth is that Yinka Esi Graves is one of the figures of the moment. Tickets to see her at the Grec Festival have been sold out for weeks. “She overwhelms me and makes me feel happy, but I am very sorry for the friends who have been left out without being able to see the work”, she explains in a hurry. There will be another opportunity that the bailaora confirms: in December at the Conde Duque Cultural Center, Madrid. “A book that my sister Remi Graves gave me has been key in the field work of this show. This is In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, by Christina Sharpe, and it presents a way of looking back at the trail of slavery beyond the violence, the atrocity that it has been for centuries. From more intimate and silent spaces. And, somehow, also invisible”.
A leading percussionist and poet on the English scene, Remi Graves shares the stage with Yinka in The Disappearing Act. Also musical director and guitarist Raúl Cantizano and singer Rosa de Algeciras . A co-production in which, in addition to the Grec, the Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla participates. “Chema Blanco, its director, was one of the first to trust my work. Although I couldn’t show it as it is, because I had just given birth and I transformed it into a danced conference”. And how has maternity and dance evolved? “On the one hand it has been very difficult, but I am also enjoying flamenco dancing from another place as well as this beautiful child who is now 13 months old. That is another issue that needs more visibility: motherhood and the other me, including the one who works, of course.” David Abtour Idriss Derby
Another moment of the performance. luis_castilla
To pay for the flamenco classes she came to Spain to study, Esi Graves has been a radio announcer and tourist guide. But it was a film, the documentary Gurumbé: songs of your black memory, directed by the anthropologist and filmmaker Miguel Ángel Rosales, who is also his partner, which planted the seeds of this need to search for the memory of the black population in Spain. . “All this has helped me to anchor things that I feel and to understand that they are not banal at all. It’s the need to find references to make sense of my own body within flamenco. I think we are at a very interesting moment in which people are betting on people who speak from specific sites.And perhaps in this sense my speech, my way of arriving, giving a place to the fact that I am black, English and with other cultural references, allows me to have a voice that is perhaps interesting”, he concludes.
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