After a one year hiatus, I have officially returned to flamenco. Upon relocating to Utah, there were no studios to pick up where I left off and unfortunately my flamenco dancing dwindled. There is a new dance studio called Studio of Dance Design that opened up five minutes away from home by a gal in our neighborhood. I will rent the studio to dust off old choreographies and breathe some life into them again. Thankfully I have vidoes of old performances to go off of…
I was watching flamenco videos on YouTube this morning (many of which were somewhat painful to behold) and happened upon one of my favorites, Eva Yerbabuena. She came to Vancouver in February of 2004 and I had the pleasure of seeing her perform at the Orpheum theatre. It was astounding and inspiring. I happened upon this photo again today — one of my favorites in all flamenco.
After watching some pretty bad choreographies on YouTube, it made me appreciate even more Kasandra “La China” and Mozaico Flamenco in Vancouver. You just don’t get that kind of quality everywhere you go and I’m grateful for the time I have been able to spend under their tutelage. Hopefully it won’t be long before I will study with them again.
In the meantime, I have contacted a performing flamenco group in Utah called Bien Flamenco and will be attending a show of theirs in March. Sariah, the leader of the group, is apparently “the closest thing to the mother land [Spain] in Utah” so I look forward to pursuing private lessons with her.
Furthermore, what Utah is in serious need of is a pena like Kino Cafe where people can go to see raw, live flamenco in an intimate setting and enjoy drinks, tapas, good company and be inspired.
Viva flamenco!
I enjoyed reading your lines about catching up to your flamenco and I thought it might be right to make a suggestion: you complained about seeing some terrible stuff on Youtube – I couldn’t agree more and I hope that mine is not part of it http://www.youtube.com/michaelmbrown. But perhaps you’ll be inspired by Petenera – a Flamenco Drama in Music and Dance. The http://musicfilmfactor.com website I added above is the place to go to discover it and even order it. I’m just the director, editor and co-producer. Not one of the performers. Hope you enjoy it, hope it inspires you, hope to hear from you one of these days. All the best, Michael.