(enlace) Flamenco's Strange New Moves

By VALERIE GLADSTONE
Published: May 8, 2005

JEREZ DE LA FRONTERA, Spain

SINCE 1994, the Jerez Flamenco Festival has drawn flamenco lovers, many of them American, to this small, pretty town in the heart of Andalusia. For 15 days, they see exhibits, master classes and performances by both new and established dancers and musicians. On a cold and rainy late winter night, a crowd of shivering festival patrons hurried into the Teatro Villamarta for a premiere from María Pagés, a leading light of the flamenco revolution that has turned this traditional dance form into a hot show-biz commodity.


María Pagés is a sinuous dancer of traditional flamenco; but tradition takes a back seat in her full-length "Songs Before a War."
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Arts & Leisure (May 8, 2005)

The Pagés Company's "Songs Before a War" ("Canciones, Antes de una Guerra") showed clearly that commercial success is not necessarily a good thing. Ms. Pagés, who won a wide following in the flamenco segment of "Riverdance," was trying to use this soulful, ancient dance to convey an antiwar message. Supplanting the usual keening vocals and thrumming guitars with popular music associated with war, she kicked up her heels to Louis Armstrong's "When the Saints Go Marching In" and to African songs sung by Tsidii Le Loka. In the final moments, a curtain painted with a map of the world unfurled behind the performers as John Lennon's "Imagine" played over the sound system.

(leer +) [vía new york times]