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The future of flamenco

Putting new moves on a traditional dance form
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By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
August 29th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Maya is bringing a new work, Dibujos, for her performing debut in Prague.
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Belén Maya

When: Aug. 29 and 30 at 8
Where: Divadlo Archa
Tickets: 390 Kč, available through Ticketpro and at the venue

Practicing an art firmly rooted in tradition, sometimes the biggest strides must be made outside its homeland, away from customs that can stifle creation.
“It’s sad, but it’s true,” says dancer Belén Maya, that the iconic Spanish flamenco sometimes feels most staid in its native Spain. Between tourists and traditionalists who want flamenco frozen in its past forms, her modern-tinged choreography can feel more welcome on the road.
“There are a lot of people in Spain who want to keep it traditional,” Maya acknowledges. “But it’s OK, we keep going,” she adds with a mischievous laugh.
Maya tours internationally at a busy pace, relishing the spread of her beloved dance style to new regions and fans. Her upcoming performances at Archa Theater will be her first in the Czech Republic.
Being on the road is something Maya is better suited to than most. She was born in New York in 1966, while her parents Carmen Mora and Mario Maya were on tour with their own flamenco act.
Despite both parents starring on the flamenco circuit, Maya says, “I didn’t have an artist’s life as a child.” She wasn’t at the clubs where her parents performed, and she studied ballet rather than flamenco. But flamenco was inevitably part of her life. “I learned the traditions from my parents,” she says, who were also interested in pushing the traditional envelope through their choreography and performance styles.
Eventually, after her parents divorced and her mother passed away, Maya succumbed to the pulse of flamenco in her blood.
“I think I linked flamenco to family,” she says. “That’s the emotional reason I dance flamenco.”
Beyond her parents’ influence, Maya found that flamenco worked for her as a sort of dance therapy, soothing her soul and fulfilling her need to emote and express through this art form. “There’s something very deep” in flamenco, she explains. “It’s how I get things out.”
Flamenco’s forceful role for female dancers gives Maya a healthy self-confidence boost as well, she says. “You can be very powerful, very independent, but also very feminine.”
Thanks to her practice of imbuing traditional flamenco steps with her feelings, Maya has been praised worldwide for breaking from the sometimes-overbearing melodrama often associated with the dance. Sara Wolf of Dance magazine praised Maya for advancing flamenco’s future simply by “dancing with joy and humanity.”
In her solos, Maya creates stunning shapes through languid movements and port de bras, then sparks to life with sudden bursts of energy that send her stomping and spinning around the stage. She plays with the lights and darks of flamenco, not only in the steps, but in the lighting and costumes, and her actions and emotions.
As she developed her own style of dance and choreography, Maya moved on from guest-performer roles in flamenco companies in Spain and Japan and founded her own troupe, La Diosa en Nosotras, in 1997. An additional boost to her fame was a significant role in Flamenco, a 1996 film showcasing performances from flamenco’s most popular artists (which also featured her father, Mario Maya).
She debuted the piece she will be performing at Archa in Spain last year. Since then, she’s also taken it to China, Spain, the Netherlands and New York. Its title, Dibujos, means drawings. Maya says she choreographed the piece to “draw” a path between different forms of flamenco, between dance and music and between the performers and the audience.
“It’s about solo dancers and their traditional flamenco styles,” she says. “We tried to show their evolution” from time-honored flamenco routines to Maya’s contemporary compositions.
“There is no better way to honor those who have preceded us than by reinventing their memory,” says David Montero, director of Dibujos. “Belen knows this and perhaps it is because of this that her dance is a pure gift, impassioned — an exact translation of a sentiment that occurred in another time and space, reborn in this instant as a treasure for our eyes and our hearts.”
Flamenco’s roots reach back beyond the eighth century in Spain, to the region’s mix of Andalusian, Islamic and Gypsy cultures. Today the flamenco dancer, particularly the woman, or bailaora, in her close-fitting dress flaring into cascades of ruffles at the knee, is the iconic image of Spanish dance to the rest of the world.
“It’s got its own traditional music and physical steps,” Maya says of flamenco’s technical backbone. But “it has to evolve; it’s a form of art.”
As yet another step in the art form’s evolution, Maya conducts flamenco workshops for budding dancers worldwide. She held one here in Prague at the recommendation of a Spanish expat in June 2006.
Maya’s voice — girlish and sweet, very different from the imposing, womanly aura she brings to the stage — gets positively giddy when discussing her debut in Prague, a city she marveled at on her first visit.
“[The Spanish expat] told me the Czech people would love flamenco because of their personality,” she says, which proved to be true in the workshop. Continuing her mission to take flamenco beyond the tourists to appreciative international dance aficionados, Maya says she’s looking forward to performing her chosen art form for Prague, presenting both its traditional past and its ever-evolving future.

Brooke Edge can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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