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Joaquin Cortes Interview:

Narrator:

Joaquin Cortes Interview:

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Joaquin Cortes is a superstar.

At 28, the dancer and choreographer has taken Spain’s native art form, flamenco, and turned it into international box office gold.

The dancer who’s become as well known on the gossip pages as the dance columns remains surprisingly accessible – apparently accepting that he is an ambassador as well as an artist.

I think it was a golden moment, a golden moment, right? This is a very good moment where, aside from classical orthodox flamenco, there is now this fusion of styles that we are doing, young people like me, we want to give a more universal message and that everyone can see flamenco, right?

It may be the element of fusion that holds the key to Joaquín Cortés's international acceptance. Trained as a dancer with the Spanish National Ballet, his work marries flamenco with a smorgasbord of musical influences.

At a musical level, to me, I mean I love music, I have always liked to mix music styles, flamenco with blues, with salsa, I don’t know, even with funk, Flamenco can be fused, is a culture that is open to everything, it is open to experimentation levels, it can experience with everything.

Experimentation blended with classic flamenco technique and superimposed on the smouldering reputation of a '90s sex symbol. There's no question that it's the work of Joaquín Cortés that's doing most to introduce another generation to the music and dance of flamenco.

Joaquín Cortés has taken flamenco and made himself a megastar, both nationally and internationally, but he's done it with performances which he himself admits are a fusion of pure flamenco and other forms and styles. What some are asking is: If that's what it takes to make flamenco the new rock and roll, can the pure form of flamenco survive?

Refined, elegant, restrained, the dancing of Gabriel Heredia is deeply rooted in the traditions of classical flamenco. Now in his 50s, Gabriel is respected for the purity of his technique and his understanding of flamenco's history, and a ray of hope for an outsider like myself who'd like to believe that you don't have to be Spanish to understand flamenco.

Gabriel Heredia:

I felt I had an affinity. I felt it was something karmic, my being involved in flamenco, my love for flamenco. I'm going back to when I was very young, when I was 12 or 13.

Narrator:

In Sydney.

Gabriel Heredia:

Yes.

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Even at that distance you felt that you were able to ... It communicated to you.

Gabriel Heredia:

The communication was so strong that nothing else mattered.

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Gabriel dances with the Blanca del Rey company. If there is criticism of commercialism and innovation within the flamenco community, it's muted and very tactful. They prefer, I found, to let their own music and dance speak for them.

Gabriel Heredia:

People that like flamenco like flamenco for what it is within its changing state. People that like fusion or come into contact with flamenco spectacles, like Joaquín is presenting and other people, if that eventually leads them into contact with perhaps a more traditional form or a purer form, well that's positive.

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Spectacular as it is, the dance is just one part of this complex form. At the Madrid bar La Soleá, Gabriel introduced me to the elements that make up the true flamenco. Inheritors of the guitar tradition, Jerónimo Maya, 20, and his brother, Leo, 15.

Gabriel Heredia:

We hear a blending of cultures. I hear fusion that goes back 2,000 years, maybe more. It's about everything. It's about everything. It's about life. It's about communication. It's about relationships, the blossom and then breakup. It's about a rebelliousness, I think, against what we are forced to live and accept within a society over which we have no say, really.

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Guitarist Interview:

Well off the tourist track, this is the flamenco the aficionados come for. It's a burgeoning market, producing more CDs and tapes now than ever before. There's no sense here that the shock of the new provides anything more than a healthy challenge.

What’s certain is that you haveto take musical influences of all kinds, from classical music to blues, jazz, bossa nova, country music, but always without forgetting your roots, and I do not I believe in the word pollution, I believe in the word progression and sure man, I think it doesn’t get contaminated, but you have to always progress looking back.

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For many, the true soul of flamenco lies in the form the tourists seldom see, the cante.

Rafael Jiménez:

(singing).

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It's wild, almost Asian tones are a reminder of its probable origins, brought by the Gypsies from northern India, across Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa. If it is the soul of flamenco, it is also the soul of Andalusia, the southern province of Spain that is flamenco's home. Flamenco was born out of a landscape that's wild and harsh and unforgiving. It was created by people who worked with horses and cattle on the plains and plateaus of Andalusia. Above all, it's the music of a displaced people, and its subjects are pain and longing and loneliness.

Rafael Jiménez:

(singing).

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Rafael Jiménez, known as Falo, is one of the most distinguished contemporary cantaors, or singers of cante.

Rafael Jiménez:

(singing).

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Rafael Jimenez Interview:

Singing here with the guitarist David Serva, he appears to my untrained ear to be improvising, yet he says that the cante is in fact a highly formal art.

Actually what they said, we do not really improvise, starting from a basic structure of knowledge of the classic like any music of the world, the lyrical itself, but rather in folk music, from the knowledge of the base we may personalize it, we add a nuance to a song that is not really improvised, that is actually very well studied, but you have to do it with enough personality so that the nuance that you put to it can be really natural so that it seems that it has always been there.

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A dancer, a guitarist, a singer. The ingredients could hardly be simpler, yet as a complete spectacle, flamenco is a complex blend which claims the status of a major art form on the world stage. Aficionados study for years the relationship between its formal traditions and its improvised moments.

Gabriel Heredia:

Feeling it as something that is your own, feeling it as something that you're able to give, you're able to create your own material, if you're a musician, create your own variations that will work into these patterns, if you're a dancer also.

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Yet at its height, flamenco can also communicate with the merest novice.

Speaker 4:

(singing).

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Bianca del Rey Interview:

Blanca del Rey is a prima donna of flamenco, leading her own company, directing, choreographing, and dancing. She's famed above all for her shawl dance.

Flamenco is what you have told me and flamenco is also the deepest and most human pain that ... flamenco speaks of death, flamenco speaks of life, flamenco speaks of love, flamenco speaks of frustration, flamenco speaks of impotence. Flamenco is the first protest song to be heard, at least as far as I know, in Spain. Flamenco is life!

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Whatever the claims made for it, flamenco itself tends to be more eloquent still. In a Peña or flamenco bar in Andalusia, I caught a glimpse of the future in the shape of Ana and Inma and their flamenco troupe. Ana is nine. Inma is eight. Whether modernist fusion or purist traditionalism wins the day, these two leave little room for doubt that the technique, power, and energy of flamenco are as alive as they ever were.