Introduction
Since the eighteenth century, travellers, artists, and intellectuals have offered picturesque descriptions of the dance spectacles and other forms of exotic entertainment they encountered across southern Spain. Alongside the iconic cave dwellings of the Sacromonte neighbourhood in Granada, a key location that has occupied this international imaginary is Triana, a neighbourhood located in the eastern part of the city of Seville, across the river Guadalquivir.Footnote 1 Historically, Triana was home to a multi-ethnic population of Afro-Iberians and Roma (known in Spanish as Gitanos), and it is also known as one of the cradles of flamenco, as it has shaped prominent varieties of festive flamenco styles that crystalized in the nineteenth century, such as tangos and bulerías, as well as local variations of cante jondo (deep song) styles such as soleares, tonás, and martinetes.Footnote 2 In the twentieth century, the built environment and sociocultural dynamics of Triana underwent profound changes as a consequence of repeated floods in the 1950s and 1960s and the subsequent implementation of new urban policies during the second half of Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939–75). Thus, while Triana is still commonly associated with flamenco festivity, today it has also become an object of nostalgic contemplation, especially for former inhabitants who have witnessed a progressive erosion of the area's communitarian bonds. As this article will argue, that nostalgia is not merely a generic symptom of periods of modernization and gentrification; nor does it reproduce the rather abstract and unproductive form of yearning for bygone times that some early critics have identified in flamenco.Footnote 3 Drawing on case studies from a local repertoire of flamenco dance in Seville, I will examine how performances of nostalgia for Triana can be understood as embodied memories of experiences of forced displacement, systemic repression, and marginalization of Andalusian underclasses during the Franco dictatorship.
To date, there is limited scholarship on the ways in which flamenco, understood here as a multi-disciplinary repertoire of artistic practices that includes dance and song, has engaged with memories of the Franco dictatorship, an episode that still causes widespread struggles, debates, and political divisions in contemporary Spanish society.Footnote 4 Pedro Ordóñez Eslava examines the work of contemporary flamenco artists such as Rocío Márquez, Niño de Elche, Andrés Marín, and Israel Galván, who have engaged critically with the legacies of dictatorial violence, often drawing on complex intersections between flamenco and conceptual and experimental art forms.Footnote 5 Other scholars have examined the work of a previous generation of politically engaged flamenco artists, who denounced dictatorial violence in the lyrics of their songs and in theatricalized performances of flamenco dance during the final stages of the Franco dictatorship and Spain's transition to democracy (commonly demarcated as 1975–82).Footnote 6 Using a different angle, I will focus here on performances of flamenco that are not overtly politicized and yet contain meaningful, and even critical, expressions of memories of dictatorial violence. Beyond previous scholarship on critical expressions of memory in politicized and experimental forms of flamenco, then, I suggest that traditional flamenco dance is a meaningful source to address the understudied cultural impacts of urban developments that occurred during Franco's dictatorial rule.
By means of comparison, the sentimentalized terms in which Triana is often invoked in flamenco has strong similarities with the roles of nostalgia in musical genres such as fado and Argentinean tango. Musicologists working on fado have argued that nostalgia, or saudade, is a complex sentimental structure that, over time, has accumulated a variety of meanings, depending on the personal background of artists and listeners, as well as on the wider historical, social, and institutional contexts in which this music is performed. As Lila Ellen Gray observes, saudade should be understood as a ‘temporally and emotionally multivalent force’ that may evoke state-sanctioned nostalgia for tradition during Portugal's Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–74), as well as ongoing forms of fetishization of traditional spaces in the era of mass tourism, and even nostalgia for the dictatorship itself.Footnote 7 From a different perspective, Richard Elliott argues that saudade can be a meaningful emotional framework to help musicians and listeners engage critically with the impact of urban and economic policies of the Estado Novo on the city of Lisbon. Indeed, as Elliott observes, certain expressions of saudade in the fado repertoire can be seen as attempts ‘to trace the remembered and imagined city of the past via a poetics of haunting’.Footnote 8 In this regard, Elliott examines several relevant examples of what he calls ‘critical nostalgia’ in fado; for example, songs that thematize the demolition of key areas of Lisbon and articulate subtle critiques of state planning under dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.Footnote 9
In a way similar to nostalgic discourses about Lisbon, Triana is a densely layered point of reference in flamenco, where it denotes discourses of authenticity, communitarian lifestyles, and an urban location that has been progressively eroded of its former cultural significance. Through a contextualized reading of invocations of Triana in three flamenco dance performances, I will show that this area is also a meaningful reference in a web of memories of systemic violence with local and transnational ramifications. In what follows, I will start by giving an overview of the profound changes that Triana, alongside other urban locations across Spain, underwent since the second half of the Franco dictatorship. In the next section, I will develop the theoretical framework for my analysis. Drawing on Svetlana Boym's distinction between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ types of nostalgia, I will explore how festive practices of flamenco dance that are often considered as traditional and folkloric acquire deeper significance as embodied expressions of nostalgic memories. Thereafter, I will analyse three interrelated case studies from a repertoire of dance practices in Seville. First, I will provide a close reading of the documentary film Triana pura y pura, which is based on an eponymous performance of flamenco dance and song from 1983. Building on my analysis of Triana pura y pura, I will then examine recent work by Pastora Galván and Israel Galván, who belong to a younger generation of dancers from Seville who did not undergo experiences of forced displacement under Franco, but whose artistic practices are intimately and critically entangled with collective memories of that episode. Departing from these case studies, this article sets out to establish new conceptual links between flamenco, nostalgia, urban history, and post-dictatorial memory.
Triana in the twentieth century: from natural disasters to urban transformations
Triana was one of the most-affected areas when, in the early 1960s, neighbourhoods throughout southern Spain were destroyed by heavy rainfalls. In November 1961, following repeated floods in earlier decades, a tributary of the Guadalquivir river burst through a retaining wall and inundated large parts of Seville.Footnote 10 Owing to the poor construction quality of many multi-family homes in Triana, known as corrales de vecinos, this natural disaster posed an immediate threat for the livelihood of the area's inhabitants. These circumstances led Francisco Franco's dictatorial regime to accelerate a process of segregated urban planning. In the aftermath of 1961, highly valuable territories in Triana were expropriated and many of its inhabitants relocated, first to temporary shelters, and subsequently to new areas of sponsored housing, known as polígonos de viviendas, on the fringes of the city.Footnote 11
This experience of forced displacement radically changed the lives of the community from Triana. Former neighbours were now living far apart in remote areas of Seville, unable to see each other for months, sometimes years. After their relocation to the newly built polígonos, families had to intermingle with communities from other regions of the country, which aggravated feelings of isolation and homesickness for those who were used to strong local and communitarian lifestyles.Footnote 12 In particular, the displacement of a community of artists from Triana impeded them from continuing to practice flamenco as part of everyday life. While the patios in Triana had been accessible fora for spontaneous musical gatherings, in the unhospitable context of the polígonos there were much fewer chances for the community to share their musical culture.Footnote 13
Testimonies of this impactful episode, as documented by historians, journalists, and filmmakers, foreground a widespread feeling of nostalgia among the displaced community from Triana. For instance, the historiography Triana. La otra orilla del flamenco (1931–1970) by Ángel Vela Nieto and the documentary film An Andalucian Journey by Jana Bokova give insight into the trajectories of some of the flamenco artists who were forced to leave their homes during this period, such as Pepa la Calzona, El Juani, El Coneja, Carmen la del Titi, and Tragapanes, showing that these individuals continued to mourn their separation from Triana long after they moved to the city's peripheries.Footnote 14 The source that has perhaps gained most visibility in this debate is the documentary Triana pura y pura, by the filmmaker and music producer Ricardo Pachón.Footnote 15 Since the 1980s, Pachón has made frequent media interventions about the recent history of Triana, including a television mini-series about flamenco that he directed for Spanish national television in 1984.Footnote 16 As a consequence, his work has dominated the cultural outputs about the recent history of this area, with crucial impacts on the ways in which musicians, aficionados, and scholars have come to think about the impact of experiences of forced displacement on Seville's flamenco tradition.
While Triana pura y pura has received considerable national and international acclaim, critics have also pointed to important inaccuracies in Pachón's work.Footnote 17 As the journalist and flamenco scholar Manuel Bohórquez notes, Pachón is incorrect in suggesting that all families were evicted from Triana against their will. In fact, many of them welcomed the prospect of moving to new apartments with better sanitary conditions.Footnote 18 Similarly, scholars have noted that the corrales de vecinos in Triana were unhealthy and overcrowded spaces, and not the idealized artistic environments that some speakers in Triana pura y pura have referred to.Footnote 19 Nevertheless, Pachón's work deserves credit for pointing to the important relations between the evictions that occurred in Triana and the wider modernization project that was initiated by Franco's dictatorial regime during the same period. Scholarship in areas such as urbanism, geography, and history has revealed that, in response to the dramatic flood of 1961 and similar natural disasters in other parts of the country, the Franco regime's new housing policies led to widespread speculation practices, as well as to the increased marginalization of Spain's underclasses.Footnote 20 Landlords in Triana, for instance, were able to take advantage of the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos (Law of Urban Lettings), dating from 1946, that allowed them to evict tenants from properties that were deemed uninhabitable without a need to offer a detailed justification or monetary compensation to such tenants. The liberalization of the construction sector during these years, moreover, spawned an overproduction of housing stock aimed at the middle classes, and therefore did not resolve the scarcity of accessible dwellings for excluded communities with limited economic means.Footnote 21 Furthermore, while the unifamilial apartments in the polígonos were meant to facilitate genuine improvements for those communities, the sanitary and cultural facilities in these new locations were often substandard.Footnote 22
For these reasons, scholars have noted that the incorporation of families from Triana into a stock of newly built apartments was not only motivated by humanitarian concerns, but also by the dictatorship's interest in disciplining and domesticating what it considered to be ‘nomadic’ tendencies in society.Footnote 23 Justin Crumbaugh, commenting on Spain's tourism industry, explains how the dramatic expansion of this sector during the 1960s helped the Franco dictatorship reinvent an undemocratic model of governance under the umbrella of a discourse of modernization.Footnote 24 The relocation of the community from Triana to the polígonos can be understood as an equally ambivalent intervention, with which the regime strengthened its grip over marginalized areas of Spain's urban population by bringing their lifestyles more in line with the standards of a modern consumerist society. Departing from these intersections between local experiences of forced displacement and the wider social, economic, and political changes that occurred during the second half of the Franco dictatorship, I will here further investigate how this episode has shaped a series of flamenco dance performances from Seville.
Nostalgia, musical festivity, and memory
For the theoretical framework of my analysis, I will draw on Svetlana Boym's seminal work The Future of Nostalgia, which explores different types of nostalgia in a variety of urban settings, works of popular culture, and literature. Following Boym, nostalgia can be broadly defined as ‘the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility’.Footnote 25 As she explains, displacement from a location (one's home) or a different time (for instance, one's childhood) leads the nostalgic subject to cling to an experience that is considered, and often actively constructed, as irrecoverable. The specific ways in which nostalgia establishes a relation with a lost object can nonetheless be varied. By means of systematizing its different varieties and tendencies, Boym has offered an influential distinction between a ‘restorative’ type of nostalgia, which aims to reconstruct a lost point of origin, such as a stable sense of homeland, and a ‘reflective’ form that points to more subtle and artistic ways of ‘inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones’.Footnote 26 In that sense, nostalgia, like melancholia and other common tropes of memory, reflects a certain relation not only with the past, but also with the present. While restorative nostalgia understands the past as a point of origin that needs to be rescued to prevent a radical emptying of meaning of the present, reflective nostalgia, by contrast, sees the past as a field of potentialities that continues to pose ethical and creative challenges for the present and future. Accordingly, Boym suggests that the latter, reflective form of nostalgia can be thought of as a combination of apparently contradictory emotional states: one of ‘deep mourning’ and one of ‘play’.Footnote 27
This article will explore further how Boym's theoretical discussion of nostalgia can be applied to festive and playful forms of musical performance. I argue that, in flamenco, a meaningful setting for the circulation of nostalgia is the festive musical gathering, or fiesta. Different flamenco scholars have conceptualized the fiesta as a forum for entertainment and distraction, as a framework that facilitates the ritual affirmation of social values, and as a setting that encourages subtle ways of questioning authority through derisive musical practices. Gerhard Steingress, for example, sees the fiesta as a transformative space that enables the active construction of social meaning and identity.Footnote 28 Similarly, Clara Chinoy, in a discussion of the specific meanings of flamenco for the Gitano community, observes that ‘a fiesta (party) is an assertion of tradition, memory and identity’.Footnote 29 Cristina Cruces Roldán, commenting on a series of festive flamenco practices from Seville, notes that the bodily vocabulary of rhythmic styles such as the tango and the bulería contains an array of subtle acts of provocation and mockery, which, in her view, help the participating artists perform an ‘enveloping communal ritual and symbolic communion’.Footnote 30 The dance historian K. Meira Goldberg, in her work on the silenced genealogies of Blackness in flamenco, has suggested along similar lines that there are a variety of meanings at play in the derisive gestures of the bulería, which hover between the mockery of privilege and the affirmation of a number of spiritual and social values.Footnote 31 Both scholars, moreover, have pointed to the broader historical significance of the jocular varieties of bulerías and tangos originating in Triana, as these may well preserve, they suggest, the traces of fifteenth-century Afro-Iberian dances that have often lacked visibility, and even been actively repressed, in institutional and popular understandings of flamenco.Footnote 32
While these scholars do distinguish between a variety of festive settings – acknowledging, for instance, that there are significant differences between a staged party and an informal family gatheringFootnote 33 – I aim to offer an even more specific reading of the meanings that the flamenco fiesta acquires in specific material, social, and historical contexts. I contend that, in the aftermath of experiences of urban displacement that occurred in Seville during the Franco dictatorship, the festive gathering has become a musical framework that facilitates the circulation of nostalgic memories of a lost home and a partially idealized past. In other words, in performances of flamenco in post-Franco Spain, nostalgic longing and festive musical practice can be seen as mutually constitutive – a dialectic that I will call ‘nostalgic festivity’.
My understanding of the intersections between nostalgia and festivity in flamenco builds upon the work of scholar Paul Connerton, who has conceptualized the various ‘acts of transfer’ that enable the transmission of embodied memory. Connerton dedicates a key section of his landmark study How Societies Remember to the analysis of a variety of ‘commemorative ceremonies’.Footnote 34 As he states, ceremonies and rituals operate as mnemonic devices because they ‘explicitly refer to prototypical persons and events’.Footnote 35 Connerton's study has inspired later work by performance scholars such as Joseph Roach, who has coined the concept of the ‘behavioral vortex’ to examine how embodied memory is channelled through specific physical and social contexts,Footnote 36 and Diana Taylor, who explores how the transmission of cultural memory occurs through a ‘repertoire’ of embodied practices.Footnote 37 In Taylor's work, one specific framework for the transmission of embodied memory is what she dubs the ‘scenario’: a codified environment wherein individuals and communities can re-stage a past situation. Importantly, such scenarios are enacted but also re-enacted; they are a generative force that enables the circulation of memory in the present, but as part of an existing repertoire, they are also objects of commemoration.Footnote 38
In accordance with Connerton's and Taylor's terminology, I propose that the flamenco fiesta is one specific ‘commemorative ceremony’ or ‘scenario’ where forms of apparently spontaneous and improvised behaviour in the present acquire deeper meaning as acts of remembrance. Even if expressions of nostalgic festivity in flamenco are not always as rigorously coded as the commemorative events analysed by Connerton, the fiesta can still have a decidedly ‘backward-looking’ character.Footnote 39 Similar to Connerton's concept, performances of nostalgic festivity in flamenco often build on localized dance vocabularies, as well as on a long-standing repertoire of popular lyrics containing romantic descriptions of Triana and other locations. However, even if nostalgia has been a stock sentiment in ways of navigating the city of Seville and its associated musical practices, then that does not preclude artists from attaching new memories to such pre-existing nostalgic enactments. As Richard Elliott notes about fado, depending on the specific context of a performance, the ‘seeming passivity and reversion to fate’ voiced through this music can turn into an act of ‘stubborn refusal’.Footnote 40 By highlighting the critical potentials of saudade, Elliott provides meaningful building blocks ‘to imagine a progressive, agency-oriented programme that deliberately and explicitly uses nostalgia at its base’.Footnote 41
Elliott's proposal finds an echo in the work of several scholars of popular culture in Francoist Spain, who have explored how music, film, and other cultural forms that circulated during the dictatorship could have become vehicles for the expression of memories and feelings that were not sanctioned by the state. For instance, Eva Woods Peiró observes that while Francoist musicals are often written off as ‘product[s] of Fascist ideology’, these films may also have mediated non-hegemonic senses of nostalgia for thousands of Spaniards who underwent experiences of loss and displacement during the Spanish Civil War and post-war years.Footnote 42 Similarly, Stephanie Sieburth has explored how singing along to the songs of the famous copla singer Conchita Piquer may have served as a therapeutic practice for the vanquished of the civil war in the absence of other institutional or social structures where they could work through traumatic experiences of violence, fear, and persecution.Footnote 43 The work of these scholars provides important tools to examine how enactments of nostalgia for Triana in the flamenco repertoire may have had a very similar role in voicing an as-yet underexplored set of memories of forced displacement. While this article will analyse a series of festive gatherings that were staged in front of cameras and audiences, a careful reading of these sources will enable me to hypothesize how, in the aftermath of the 1960s, similar fiestas that were not captured on film may have been equally productive in helping artistic communities deal with the emotional aftermath of their hardships.
With this wider purpose in mind, my methodology is inspired not only by a consideration of the subtle critical meanings that can emerge from flamenco dance and song, but also by attention to the interactions between musical performances and their wider material, social, and institutional contexts. As Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh observe, to understand how producers and consumers of music establish and negotiate a variety of musical identifications, it is fruitful to consider not only the ‘microsociality’ of musical practices, but also the larger ‘discursive, ideological, social and generic forces’ that shape them.Footnote 44 In my analysis of three different performances of nostalgia for Triana, I will examine how the meanings and potentials of embodied musical practices are mediated by such wider discursive and institutional factors.
Triana pura y pura
Nostalgia and finality (an empty present)
On 23 February 1983, the prestigious Teatro Lope de Vega in Seville opened its doors to a group of displaced artists from Triana for a festive performance of flamenco, entitled Triana pura y pura. The initiative to reunite the disintegrated community was taken by Gloria Moreno Filigrana, member of a prominent local Gitano family, with support from the flamenco producer Ricardo Pachón. In the eponymous film about the performance, released three decades later, it is also Pachón who provides a historical and narrative framework for the original event. According to Pedro G. Romero, Pachón's film presents a melancholic narrative about ‘la Triana perdida’ (‘a lost Triana’) that bypasses the multi-ethnic realities not only of life in Seville's polígonos, but also of flamenco itself.Footnote 45 On the other hand, Romero acknowledges Pachón as a crucial contributor to flamenco in the post-Franco era, due to his production work for a series of albums that went on to achieve revolutionary status, such as Nuevo día (1975) by the flamenco duo Lole y Manuel and the fusion album La leyenda del tiempo (1979) by one of the most iconic flamenco singers of all time, Camarón.
Here, it is not my intention to evaluate the credibility of the narrative presented in Triana pura y pura, but rather to further examine a variety of contrasting expressions of nostalgia in the film. Given Pachón's complex profile as a member of progressive countercultures that imagined new directions for flamenco in post-Franco Spain, as well as a disputed spokesperson for Gitanos and their role in shaping flamenco in Seville, I find it instructive to situate his work within a wider constellation of institutionalized forms of nostalgia in flamenco. Doing so will allow me to rethink Triana pura y pura as a complex multi-media project spanning several decades, in which a clear distinction should be made between, on the one hand, Pachón's retrospective idealization of the artistic practices of an elderly generation of flamenco dancers and musicians and, on the other, the role that those same artistic practices may have for the community in performing memories of urban displacement.
In the film version of Triana pura y pura, Pachón explains that the main purpose of the 1983 performance was to provide the displaced community from Triana with one last opportunity to salute their old neighbourhood, as it was very unlikely, notes Pachón, that they would have a chance to meet again after this ceremonial reunion. Accordingly, the film labels the concert as ‘La última gran fiesta de Triana’ (‘The last great celebration of Triana’). In another interview included in the film, the acclaimed flamenco dancer and teacher Matilde Coral, who is from Triana but did not leave the area in the 1960s,Footnote 46 shares in this mournful discourse when stating that with the forced displacement of other members of her community, ‘se perdió una historia viva de Triana. Viva, viva, que no ha resucitado, que no ha resucitado’ (‘a living history was lost in Triana. A living history that hasn't come back’).Footnote 47
In retrospect, it is true that no full-scale repetition of the festive event in the Teatro Lope de Vega has occurred. The large number of performers present on stage and the excellent atmosphere in the audienceFootnote 48 made the occasion stand out from later performances by these and other flamenco artists that continued to operate under different varieties of the name Triana Pura y Pura.Footnote 49 For instance, in the first episode from the documentary series El Ángel, filmed by Ricardo Pachón in the early months of 1984, a much smaller group of displaced artists can be seen performing in the patio of Seville's monumental medieval palace, the Real Alcázar. Strikingly, despite the absence of several prominent artists who did participate in the earlier show, the narrator of the television episode states that the performers are there to provide the viewers with ‘la última lección magistral de cómo se bailaba en Triana’ (‘the last master class of how people used to dance in Triana’). This example illustrates that the emphasis on the finality of the community's way of practising flamenco already was a relevant motive in Pachón's earlier audiovisual outputs. In 1985, moreover, some of the displaced performers from Triana went on to form the flamenco group Los últimos de la fiesta (‘The last at the party’), a name that, while not invented by Pachón, encapsulates the connection between festivity and finality even more clearly.Footnote 50
On one level, this insistence on finality can be considered as an expression of respect for the inevitably finite lives of a group of displaced artists and the musical knowledge that they embody. More broadly, this concept reflects a wider current in post-Franco society. As the film scholar Rob Stone notes with reference to Carlos Saura's 1985 film El amor brujo, which contains a short flamenco performance by a group of elderly Gitano dancers from Granada, by the mid-1980s, flamenco ‘was commonly perceived as a quaint style of folkdance or, at worst, a reductive legacy of an embarrassing past’.Footnote 51 Accordingly, Stone argues that El amor brujo marks the irreversible demise of a series of traditional flamenco practices, which were considered as undesirable tokens of backwardness by audiences that, at the time, felt much more in tune with new manifestations of flamenco pop, known as nuevo flamenco. From this perspective, the suggestion in Pachón's filmic work that traditional flamenco practices from Triana would soon be unavailable could be seen as a nostalgic response to a generalized appetite for innovation in Spanish society.
The nostalgic framework of Triana pura y pura also has similarities with earlier discourses about the dynamics between tradition and innovation in flamenco. Specifically, between the 1950s and 1980s, flamenco culture was dominated by the written and artistic outputs of the ‘revaluation’ movement, which set out to safeguard the most profound and serious styles of flamenco song from their seemingly imminent demise. Protagonized by the Gitano singer Antonio Mairena (1909–83), this movement reinvigorated older preoccupations about the decline of the art form that had already motivated, for instance, the organization of the famous Concurso de Cante Jondo (‘Deep Song Contest’) in Granada in 1922 by the classical composer Manuel de Falla and the poet Federico García Lorca.Footnote 52 In the context of the 1950s, the alleged loss of purity in flamenco was attributed, on the one hand, to the success of the flamenco operas popularized by singers such as Pepe Marchena, and on the other, to the propagandistic uses that flamenco and other aspects of Andalusian folklore had been subjected to by the Franco regime. As Francisco Aix Gracia notes, as the revaluation movement sought to counter the harmful impacts of co-optation and commercialization, it did so based on an understanding that, essentially, flamenco had already reached a state of completion.Footnote 53 The role of contemporary performers, then, was not to make further creative contributions to flamenco, but rather to effectively preserve a repertoire of existing artistic practices from the past.
While the revaluation movement, and Mairena's work in particular, has often been criticized for its oppressive and taxonomic focus on the fixity of existing flamenco styles, from a different perspective, critics have observed that Mairena displayed a strong fatefulness to the historical and ethnic underpinnings of the artistry of his forebearers.Footnote 54 In a similar vein, it can be argued that Triana pura y pura also vindicates a community of stigmatized outsiders of Francoist Spain. Crucially, it does so not only by resisting previous folkloric depictions of flamenco, but also by complicating the ‘whitened’ romantic fictions that circulated about the Gitano community during the dictatorship.Footnote 55
Nevertheless, what Triana pura y pura shares with earlier initiatives to save traditional flamenco is a distinct temporal logic, wherein present manifestations of this music are cordoned off from an allegedly purer past. Boym's concept of ‘restorative’ nostalgia proves useful here. She observes that this variety tends to manifest itself as a narrative about the recovery of lost origins: as a story about the past that seeks to restore and protect an absolute sense of truth and tradition.Footnote 56 Similarly, both Triana pura y pura and earlier discourses on flamenco reflect a certain neglect for the ways in which present-day forms of creativity can give continuity to the art form. As Aix Gracia notes, one of the paradoxical operations of the revaluation movement was its tendency to disguise all types of creativity in flamenco performance with a rhetoric of preservationism.Footnote 57 It is, indeed, ironic, notes Peter Manuel, that Antonio Mairena, in his attempt to safeguard earlier varieties in the flamenco song repertoire, ended up giving a final shape to song styles that existed in much looser varieties before his interventions.Footnote 58
The complex questions over creativity and ownership that were already present in Mairena's artistic project are even more poignant in the case of Pachón, who, unlike Mairena, is not part of the artistic community that his work is dedicated to. Thus, as a rather detached spokesperson for the flamenco tradition in Triana, his discourse of fixity and finality raises wider questions over representation and self-representation. As the performance scholar Joseph Roach has discussed in a different context, numerous Anglo-white authors in the nineteenth century repeatedly staged the figure of the ‘vanishing Indian’ in their novels and plays, thereby depriving Native American communities of the ability to negotiate the legacies of historical violence in the present: ‘The violence of this narration reinscribes the violence of laws such as those mandating Indian removal: the Native American disappears, at the stroke of the white man's pen, and only the aesthetic Indian remains behind, in memory, in representation, in effigy, and (very often) in fact’.Footnote 59 A crucial point from Roach's discussion is that such ‘the last of’ storiesFootnote 60 create a mythicized representation of communities that have been subjected to systemic violence, while overlooking the latter's strategies of creative adaptation to the present. Similarly, the narrative framework of Triana pura y pura, as progressively constructed in a series of interviews with Pachón in the same film, fails to consider how the displaced community from Triana may have found creative means to negotiate their collective losses through flamenco.
An interview with the dancer Matilde Coral, also included in Triana pura y pura, illustrates how finality emerges from the film not only as a discursive concept, but also as a type of embodied practice. Throughout the film, Coral, Pachón, and other speakers comment passionately on the remarkable dance techniques that were used by some of the protagonists of the 1983 performance, such as the distinctive steps of El Pati, who grabs the collar of his own suit when marching off-stage in the last steps of the bulería, or the idiosyncratic backward jumps performed in the tangos by the artist El Herejía. Coral speaks in a particularly emotive tone about the dancer Carmen la del Titi, the daughter of a man known to be the creator of the local variety of tangos. Zooming in on one moment from the show where Carmen la del Titi shakes her shoulders as she walks backward to finish her steps and bring closure to the 12-beat bar of the bulería – a concept known in flamenco dance as recogerse – Coral explains that she has observed and studied this movement intensively – even obsessively: ‘me he dejado la retina en eso’ (comparable to a memory being progressively ‘seared into one's brain’). However, Coral adds that she does not want to perform these movements, out of a fear to soil or ruin them. Nonetheless, she concludes, such movements represent an invaluable legacy from an era that ended when Carmen la del Titi and other artists had to leave their old neighbourhood.Footnote 61
Coral's words indicate that there are elements from this humorous and playful dance vocabulary that she, for complex reasons, has not dared to reproduce in her own practices of flamenco. It appears that this vocabulary is deeply alive in Coral's mind, even if it remains untouched by her body. Perhaps, precisely by not performing such movements, Coral seeks to maintain a strong emotional attachment to this tradition. Her testimony illustrates Jane Desmond's assertion that movement styles are important social texts that signal ‘group filiation and group differences, whether consciously performed or not’.Footnote 62 Desmond asserts that dance is a combination of embodied practices and wider attitudes towards the body that determine to what extent certain movements are morally and aesthetically acceptable. From this viewpoint, notes Desmond, it is as relevant to study those bodies that do dance as it is to ask: ‘who does not dance, in what ways, under what conditions and why? Why are some dances, some ways of moving the body, considered forbidden for members of certain social classes, “races”, sexes?’.Footnote 63
These questions resonate with Matilde Coral's decision not to perform the dance movements of Carmen la del Titi. While Coral has observed and studied them with great attention, she also obeys to an imperative that makes such movements forever inaccessible to her – and perhaps as well to the numerous other students and performers that she, as a major representative of a local school of flamenco dance, known as the Escuela Sevillana, has mentored. The fact that Coral herself did not leave Triana further indicates how this nostalgic framework, which makes her imagine some of the artistic practices from that neighbourhood as forbidden or otherwise inaccessible, operates with relative independence from her ongoing physical proximity to the area. This, then, is one illustration of how nostalgia for the spontaneous and everyday festivity of Triana has had consequences for the continuity of specific elements in the flamenco repertoire, which are here invested with a sense of finality that appears to make them inapt for transmission in the present – even, or perhaps especially, by those who comprehend and cherish them.
Nostalgia, festivity, and commemorative practices (a resonant present)
While I have started my reading of Triana pura y pura with an analysis of the interviews in the film, this section will take a closer look at the footage of the artistic performance on which Pachón's work is based. The original show and related dance performances registered in other audiovisual sources from the same period provide evidence of how nostalgia manifested itself ‘reflectively’ (Boym) in flamenco dance, that is, by engaging in playful ways with memories of the past.
Before illustrating this claim, a comment on the overall structure and scenery of the 1983 performance is in order. The show did not have a clear narrative framework and was mostly a succession of short and informal performances of two key festive styles: the bulerías and tangos.Footnote 64 The prominence of these two flamenco styles seems justified by the fact that locals consider them as typical dances from Triana, even if other important varieties and identitarian claims about their origins do exist in other parts of Andalusia.Footnote 65 The playful interactions between different artists throughout the show led to a number of humorous moments and subsequent outbursts of applause and jaleos, the ‘rhythmic-oral declamations’Footnote 66 with which members of the audience support the musicians on stage in performing musical explosions and conclusions (remates).Footnote 67 A solo performance of a tango by the dancer Pepa la Calzona, who is blind, aptly illustrates this vibrant communitarian atmosphere. Although Pepa la Calzona dances alone, certain movements of her hands and hips suggest that she is in fact mocking a crowd of invisible masculine admirers. A particularly comical moment arises when another artist, Manuel el Titi, approaches her to bring her to the centre of the stage. That invitation becomes unnecessary, however, when the dancer gets up by herself, daringly waving her skirt and stamping her feet, even if she appears to be unaware of the proximity of her male counterpart. This leads to laughter and applause from the other attendants, who are clearly delighted by this exquisite illustration of how the derisive dance movements of the bulería project rich comical meanings, with relative independence from the here-and-now interaction between two physical bodies.
In an article that briefly dwells on the figure of Pepa la Calzona, K. Meira Goldberg employs a critical vocabulary inspired by the field of Black performance studies – whose ‘terminologies and theoretical constructs’, she notes, can be applied productively to flamenco – to examine two interrelated aspects of the flamenco fiesta: its role in the affirmation of a sense of community, and its derisive humour.Footnote 68 In this context, Goldberg examines a scene from Ricardo Pachón's television series El Ángel, during which Pepa la Calzona performed in the patio of Seville's Real Alcázar, in the company of her son and other members of the displaced community from Triana. Goldberg argues that the interaction of this elderly dancer with other members of her community activates various positive energies, such as joy, duende, and sacredness.Footnote 69 While this staged performance by Pepa la Calzona certainly occurs in a convivial atmosphere, I would add that it should also be considered against the backdrop of these artists’ experiences of forced displacement. As I have indicated, in the 1980s, the decade in which both Triana pura y pura and El Ángel were recorded, the social and artistic bonds of Triana's community had deteriorated considerably. The material outlook of both performances, however, evokes an atmosphere that appears to be unharmed by those historical developments. As Diana Taylor notes, for the successful invocation of the past during an embodied performance, it is crucial that participants also recreate an associated physical location.Footnote 70 Indeed, the patio of the Real Alcázar where El Ángel was filmed evokes a monumental atmosphere largely unaffected by more recent urban developments under Franco's dictatorial rule. During the performance of Triana pura y pura the previous year, a similar, yet arguably rather simplistic, attempt was made to conjure up an idealized past through a series of props, such as a group of potted plants on stage and embroidered shawls (mantones) hanging on the wall. These components are all reminiscent of the patios in Triana's multi-family homes that, in the 1980s, had become inaccessible to these artists.
Pepa la Calzona's interventions in Triana pura y pura and El Ángel, then, should be seen not only as ‘statements of pleasure’, to borrow Thomas DeFrantz's terminology that has also inspired Goldberg's analysis,Footnote 71 but also as performances of ‘reflective’ nostalgia. Without subduing the ‘honesty and eloquence’Footnote 72 that these performances may convey, I would argue that their eloquence is enhanced, precisely, by the dynamic between joy and nostalgia that underpins them. In her work on the copla genre, Stephanie Sieburth has suggested that singing along to the songs of the popular singer Conchita Piquer may have had therapeutic value for the vanquished of the Civil War during the repressive climate of post-war Spain. Along similar lines, I contend that collective gatherings such as Triana pura y pura and El Ángel, where the same festive styles were performed over and over again, may have given Pepa la Calzona and other displaced artists some comfort in remembering their collective losses. Similar to Sieburth's interpretation of copla, I suggest that the pleasure of embodying the same flamenco styles and rhythms during such ceremonial gatherings may have operated for them as a compensatory mechanism in the absence of more quotidian environments where they could share and cultivate their musical practices.Footnote 73
To adduce further examples that support this interpretation, I wish to briefly turn to a section from Jana Bokova's documentary film An Andalucian Journey. Through a series of interviews with Carmen la del Titi, Tragapanes, and other artists that also performed as part of Ricardo Pachón's projects in earlier years, Bokova's film illustrates how these artists were unable to adapt to their new neighbourhoods, even several decades after their displacement from Triana. In one sequence, some of them are shown performing on the patio of a historic flamenco bar formerly located in the heart of Triana, named El Morapio.Footnote 74 As noted by the flamenco scholar José Luis Ortiz Nuevo, who operates as a spokesperson for the community in Bokova's film, former neighbours from Triana would gather on an annual basis at this location during Seville's famous Holy Week celebrations to stage a ceremonial commemoration of their past lives in Triana. Bokova captures a moment from one of these gatherings where the guitarist and singer Manuel Molina performs a bulería. His song invokes the perspective of a mournful subject who has been told to stay away from Triana: ‘Lo que tú quieras / Di lo que a ti te dé la gana / Pero por Dios no me digas que no vaya por Triana’ (‘Whatever you want / Say whatever you want / But, for God's sake, don't tell me not to go to Triana’).Footnote 75 Importantly, these lyrics are heard while we see images of the singer Tragapanes walking away from Triana. Moments later, Tragapanes explains that he is profoundly unhappy in his current home in the peripheral zone of Torreblanca and would sacrifice a limb to be able to return to his former neighbourhood. Thus, through a combination of music, dialogue, and image, Molina's song emerges from the sequence as a forceful musical testimony of experiences of forced displacement.
The lyrics of Molina's performance are reminiscent of other references in the flamenco repertoire to historical experiences of prohibition and persecution in the streets of Triana – which are particularly common in local varieties of deep song styles such as the tonás and martinetes. Owing to the compact character of flamenco poetry, such lyrics have the potential to invoke a variety of sentiments in those who sing and listen to them. Perhaps, the unidentified addressee in Molina's lyrics is a lover, whose roots do not lie in Triana and who therefore does not understand why the lyrical subject has a strong emotional attachment to the area. On a deeper level, however, since Molina performs this song during a ceremonial reunion at El Morapio, surrounded by older and younger members of the dislocated community from Triana, the lyrics may have allowed these participants to engage in a process of what Stephanie Sieburth calls ‘projective identification’,Footnote 76 whereby the adoption of a partially fictional role becomes a mechanism for artists and listeners to channel their own historical sentiments of prohibition, of expulsion by force – the feeling of being separated from Triana after having received orders from an unidentified Other that their presence in the area is somehow illicit and untimely. Crucially, the bulería is a decidedly festive style, often littered with satirical gestures from the dancers, as well as with ironic forms of understatement and disguise as a singer addresses themes such as longing, jealousy, and betrayal.Footnote 77 Thus, if Molina's performance of a bulería did function as a coping mechanism, it did so precisely by forging a space where painful memories could be kept at an ironic distance. Based on this significant moment in Bokova's film, not only the movements of these individuals through urban space, from the peripheries of Seville towards a now disappeared bar in Triana, but also the songs that they would sing there can be thought of as performances of reflective nostalgia, used by the artists to commemorate a painful past and negotiate feelings of displacement and isolation in the present.
Nostalgia for Triana in contemporary flamenco dance
Pastora Galván, ‘Homenaje a Triana Pura’
The siblings Pastora Galván and Israel Galván are two contemporary flamenco dancers from Seville, born respectively in 1980 and 1973, who have engaged in unique ways with a wider repertoire of nostalgic invocations of Triana. The style of the former dancer is often described as more traditional, whereas the latter's work is widely known as daringly experimental. In 2007, however, Pastora Galván released a dance production that was choreographed by her brother under the title La Francesa. This performance unravels the Carmen myth, based on Prosper Merimée's 1845 novella that was subsequently converted into an opera by Georges Bizet, and other common stereotypes of the sensual female flamenco body that have determined representations of Spanish identity.Footnote 78 The fact that these dancers have operated as a ‘brother-and-sister team’Footnote 79 for this production suggests that, despite their very different performance styles, there may be unexpected affinities between their ways of engaging critically with pre-existing imaginaries about flamenco.
In recent years, Pastora Galván has staged several danced tributes to the generation of artists displaced from Triana during the Franco dictatorship: first, in her solo show Pastora, which premiered at the Bienal de Flamenco in Seville in September 2010; and later that year, in her ‘Homenaje a Triana Pura’ (‘Homage to Triana Pura’), performed during a televised gala on Andalusia's regional channel Canal Sur, to support the candidacy of flamenco for UNESCO's list of Immaterial World Heritage. More recently, Galván has collaborated with a group of local producers and artists, in association with Seville's city council and other institutions, as part of a project called Zona Flamenca. Through a series of concerts and other cultural initiatives, this project aims to recover the memories of the displaced communities who lived in marginal areas of the city, to combat racism against the Gitano community, and to stimulate their inclusion in the city's sociocultural infrastructure.Footnote 80 In April 2022, as part of Zona Flamenca, Galván re-staged her previous tributes to Triana in the neighbourhood of Madre de Dios, where the dancer Carmen la del Titi was relocated after her displacement from Triana.
Galván's danced homages to Triana are largely based on the audiovisual material from the 1983 performance of Triana pura y pura that I analysed in an earlier section. Interestingly, Galván approached that footage not so much as a memorial to the demise of a displaced community and its associated artistic practices, but rather as a helpful source to revitalize this unique collection of dance styles. When explaining the preparatory work for this project to me, Galván observed that, after several detailed viewings of the material (not yet released then as a documentary), she selected the most significant elements and adopted them for her own production. When doing so, she paid particular attention to Carmen la del Titi, whose movements, in Galván's view, were among the richest of all the dances that were performed during the show.Footnote 81
Galván's televised performance of ‘Homenaje a Triana Pura’ is a festive bulería, in which the musicians recreate the joyful atmosphere from Triana pura y pura through a combination of dance, song, and musical accompaniment.Footnote 82 In it, Galván wears a dress with colourful patches that is reminiscent of the dresses worn by the elderly community from Triana. Furthermore, the distribution of artistic roles in Galván's performance emphasizes the importance of communitarian festivity, given that, apart from the singer José Valencia, Galván's two other musicians, the guitarist Ramón Amador and the acclaimed palmero (clapper) Bobote, also take turns in singing. Throughout the piece, Galván's body conjures up different protagonists of Triana pura y pura by making a series of direct citations from their playful dance movements. At one point, she kicks off her shoes and stamps her feet sideways while wiggling her hips – movements that are all clearly inspired by Carmen la del Titi. Another rhythmic break, prepared by an upward movement of the dancer's arm, reproduces an exact moment from Triana pura y pura where another dancer, Pastora la del Pati, brings closure to the 12-beat bar of the bulería rhythm in the same way. Towards the end of the piece, Galván performs several instances of more explosive legwork, such as a series of forward kicks and daring jumps that remember the style of Manuel el Titi and other dancers who participated in Triana pura y pura. On those occasions, the dance practices cultivated by a previous generation of artists appear to burst through the surface of Galván's own movements. To borrow Ruth Hellier-Tinoco's terminology, Galván's body here acquires an almost ‘palimpsestic’ quality as she restores a sense of ‘poetic presence’ for these artists through her own way of practising flamenco dance.Footnote 83
Apart from Galván's dancing body, there are several other musical components with strong historical resonances in the piece. One significant moment occurs halfway through the performance, when the artists pause the rhythm. This interruption is introduced by Galván herself, who ends the first half of her dance by moving towards the performers and leaning down on the table. Subsequently, the singer José Valencia intones the word ‘Triana’ with great dramatic emphasis. While singing the name of this iconic neighbourhood, Valencia modulates briefly into a minor scale before returning to the original Phrygian harmony of the bulería. The rhythm is then picked up and pulsed forward by the guitarist and palmeros. Through this subtle yet significant interruption of the original harmony, the artists appear to facilitate the entry into a new affective state, where the general joy of the fiesta from the earlier section starts intermingling with other emotions that are directed towards the past. To borrow Taylor's terminology, the fiesta here becomes a more explicit nostalgic ‘scenario’ that conjures up memories of Triana in a bygone era.
Another noteworthy musical component is the relative slowness with which the artists perform the tempo of the bulería. As highlighted in an earlier section, different local varieties and claims of ownership over the bulería exist across Andalusia; yet practices of this style in Triana tend to be relatively unrushed. In the film Triana pura y pura, Ricardo Pachón recites a line from the lyricist Carlos Lencero that praises how the bulería is normally performed in Triana, in strong opposition to faster varieties that exist elsewhere in Andalusia: ‘Tan rápido en Jerez que yo no pude, tan lento en Triana, borrachito en Utrera me entraron ganas’ (‘So quick in Jerez that I couldn't keep up / yet so slow in Triana / when I got to Utrera drunk I got in the mood’).Footnote 84 As such, Lencero's line captures the way in which varieties of tempo and rhythm bear wider cultural significance. As the musicologist Mark Abel observes, rhythm is often understood as a factor of ethnic and cultural belonging. However, contrary to the view that rhythmic skill affirms a pre-existing cultural essence, Abel argues that rhythmic playing can also manifest itself as an ‘active, conscious process of identification’ with cultural identities that are socially and artistically mediated.Footnote 85 For Galván's performance, I would argue along similar lines that the slowness of the bulería is not the outcome of these artists’ pre-existing identitarian bonds with Triana, but rather a moment that reflects a wider cultural imaginary about the slower pace of music, and life, in the neighbourhood. The artists, I contend, engage with this imaginary through music, to construct a shared nostalgic relation with the area.
Thus far, I have indicated how Galván's ‘Homenaje a Triana Pura’ performs nostalgia on the level of micro-musical practice. How, then, may this performance have facilitated the circulation of a specific set of memories of forced displacement, both for the participating artists and for their audiences? Except for the palmero Bobote, neither Galván nor her other musicians have direct experiences of forced displacement from Triana.Footnote 86 Nevertheless, many of them will have indirect relations with that episode, either due to their family ties or through other affiliative bonds with those who did experience the events first-hand. Galván's tribute to a displaced group of artists can be a mechanism, I propose, for these artists to strengthen that sense of belonging, solidarity, and respect for elderly members of their community. The effectiveness of this mechanism will, however, depend on the specific contexts in which this piece is staged.
As I have previously highlighted, Galván's has brought her ‘Homenaje a Triana Pura’ to a variety of institutional settings. As we have seen, one version of the piece was broadcast during a televised gala in 2010 to support the declaration of flamenco as Immaterial World Heritage by UNESCO that same year. Given this institutional context, it seems plausible that Galván was asked to showcase her personal relation with flamenco by emphasizing, precisely, her strong respect for traditional artistic forms. Indeed, the title of Galván's performance uses the word homenaje (homage), a discursive device that is commonly employed in the flamenco industry to acknowledge respect towards the past, as illustrated by the numerous homages that can be found on flamenco albums and in festivals and other settings.Footnote 87 From a more critical perspective, the frequent institutional framings of flamenco as ‘heritage’ have led to a critical debate about the ways in which past expressions of flamenco should inform present-day manifestations of the art form. In a critical analysis of the heritage discourses that are used to promote flamenco at various institutional levels, such as by Andalusia's regional government (Junta de Andalucía), the European Union, and UNESCO, José Luis Venegas argues that such institutions often fail to interrogate the specific conditions under which Andalusians and Spaniards are able to experience flamenco as a meaningful type of inheritance; that is to say, a cultural repertoire that does not only reaffirm existing notions of identity, but can also stimulate the construction of new cultural and political meanings. The institutional focus on cultural heritage as a stable entity, argues Venegas, has deprived flamenco of that vitality, almost converting it into ‘the echo of a forgotten language’.Footnote 88 As Venegas argues, such heritage discourses are pushing Andalusians, and Spaniards, to ‘take a back seat and simply “inherit” or “recognize” their identity rather than actively create it’.Footnote 89
Galván's ‘Homenaje a Triana Pura’, when viewed against this institutional backdrop, would appear to be yet another enactment of a rather unreflective type of nostalgia that buttresses stable, and arguably problematic, notions of ‘tradition’ or ‘heritage’. However, Galván's recent contribution to the project Zona Flamenca suggests that her work is not limited to the reaffirmation of such institutional discourses. Here, in front of audiences in Seville's peripheries, Galván's tribute to Carmen la del Titi and associated artists from Triana reflects the potentials of flamenco to also help construct alternative memories of Spain's recent past. By staging her tribute to the artistic legacy of Carmen la del Titi in the context of Zona Flamenca, Galván has helped convert the former artist into a recognizable pillar for the community from Madre de Dios and other marginal parts of Seville. In this specific context, Galván's performance of nostalgia can be seen as a contribution to struggles for the recognition of memories of dictatorial violence in Spain, as well as to the struggle against ongoing forms of marginalization of the country's Gitano community and urban underclasses.Footnote 90
Israel Galván, Lo Real
The repression of Andalusian underclasses, and specifically Gitanos, is also a key concern in Israel Galván's Lo Real. This international co-production, which premiered in Madrid's Teatro Real on 12 December 2012, engages with such issues from a wide historical perspective, as it thematizes the extermination of Roma populations by the Nazi regime. For the musical enactment of these memories in Lo Real, Galván and the collaborating artists draw on a variety of artistic traditions – flamenco, pop, contemporary academic music, and avant-garde poetry – and develop a ‘multidirectional’ network of references to local and transnational histories of systemic violence.Footnote 91 As it moves between the histories of Nazism and Francoism, Galván's performance also inserts historical enactments of nostalgia for Triana into a wider constellation of authoritarian co-optations of flamenco.
As Pedro Ordóñez Eslava notes, the three dancers who protagonize Lo Real (Israel Galván, Isabel Bayón, and Belén Maya) make their presence seen and felt in inventive ways, not only through a virtuosic collection of solo and duo performances, but also by creating a disturbing soundscape through their interactions with curious objects on stage. In the first section of the piece, for instance, Israel Galván can be seen dancing on top of a collection of unstable metal panels scattered on the floor; and in a later episode, Belén Maya interacts with a thick set of metal strings that are extended across the stage, resembling the barbed wire of a camp-like structure.Footnote 92 As the artists interact with the material and sonic textures of these materials, which appear to symbolize a history of destruction, their movements also clearly reflect a search for the enabling potentials of the dancing body. This is illustrated by a line from the song ‘Hitler in My Heart’ by Anthony and the Johnsons that is displayed on a screen at the beginning of the show and performed by one of the singers in Spanish translation: ‘from the corpses, flowers grow’. Indeed, in various press reviews and interviews, Galván and his artistic producer Pedro G. Romero have defined Lo Real as an attempt at circumscribing the inaccessible traumatic kernel of the unspeakable experiences of the Nazi death camps, and also as a performance of the liberating excesses of artistry that resist co-optation due to their radical Otherness.Footnote 93
In my analysis of Lo Real, I will focus on a fragment from the third section of the show, protagonized by Isabel Bayón.Footnote 94 This interlude, entitled ‘Carmen, la chinche y la pulga’ (‘Carmen, the Flea and the Bedbug’), parodies a tradition of stereotypical depictions of the Roma, epitomized by the Carmen myth. In Lo Real, Bayón engages with the European legacy of the Carmen figure by recreating a dance performance from the film Tiefland, directed and protagonized by the German filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Filmed between 1942 and 1944, Tiefland reproduces earlier stereotypical associations of the female Gypsy with dance, artistry, and sensuality.Footnote 95 In the film, Riefenstahl performs the role of the Spanish dancer Martha in front of an audience of masculine admirers consisting of a wealthy marquess, a poor shepherd, and a group of Roma extras. This scene from Tiefland illustrates not only the reductive stereotypes of the Roma that have been exploited on stages across the globe, but also the real history of systemic violence that underpins them. While this fact was never publicly acknowledged by Riefenstahl herself, many of the Roma extras from Tiefland were killed in Auschwitz after they finished their work for the film in the early months of 1943.Footnote 96
In Lo Real, Isabel Bayón reproduces a section from Tiefland where Riefenstahl can be seen circling around the stage while she plays the castanets with different levels of intensity. As the tempo increases towards the end of Riefentahl's performance, her tireless, uninterrupted percussion on the castanets becomes a collection of intrusive noises that, rather than effectively accentuating the rhythmical accents of the score, are often out of sync. When recreating this sequence in Lo Real, Bayón mocks Riefenstahl's questionable demonstration of sensuality and artistic skill through a series of frantic and uncontrolled movements with her arms and hands. Towards the conclusion of her parody, Bayón brings one of her seemingly uncontrollable arms into the shape of the fascist salute. Subsequently, the singer David Lagos intones the opening line from ‘Triana, Triana’, a nostalgic poem that was originally performed by the copla singer Imperio Argentina in the musical Carmen, la de Triana (1938), the first of five Andalusian folkloric films shot by the Spanish directors Florián Rey and Benito Perojo in Nazi Germany between 1937 and 1939.Footnote 97 Quite unexpectedly, and through a combination of song and dance, Bayón and Lagos here reterritorialize a wider repertoire of stereotypes of the sensual Gypsy as one that has strong relations not only with Nazi Germany, but also with Francoist Spain.
In comparison to previous case studies that I have analysed in this article, Lo Real exemplifies most clearly how local expressions of nostalgia in Seville tie into wider transnational imaginaries and ideologies. As Eva Woods Peiró observes about the protagonist of Carmen, la de Triana, the latter's strong attachment to Triana represents a ‘nostalgia for place’ that was absent from Merimée's novella on which the film is loosely based.Footnote 98 As Woods Peiró notes, while the different aesthetic and ideological concerns of Nazi Germany and Francoism that shaped Carmen, la de Triana and related films are far from monolithic, what these works have in common is a nostalgic vision of nationhood, unaffected by forms of ethnic and cultural diversity.Footnote 99 To borrow Boym's terminology, this variety of nostalgia can be understood as decidedly ‘restorative’, as it situates an allegedly purer version of the homeland in a projected past.
To be sure, the poem ‘Triana, Triana’ is now a common component of the lyrical repertoire of flamenco. For instance, in Triana pura y pura, the singer El Coco performed fragments from the same poem when accompanying the dancer Pastora la del Pati; and in Pastora Galván's televised performance of ‘Homenaje a Triana Pura’, José Valencia can be seen performing a version of the same lyrics. As the flamenco scholar Luis Suárez Ávila observes, the lyrical repertoire of flamenco contains many traces of older textual forms, often without an artist knowing that a fragment of a bulería or soleá may originally stem from, for instance, a medieval epic poem.Footnote 100 Furthermore, as Peter Manuel notes, the words used in flamenco song can normally not be attributed to one single author.Footnote 101 Indeed, it is fairly common for flamenco singers to freely reorder and recombine the stanzas and verses of existing lyrics and poetic compositions – a process that Suárez Ávila calls ‘fragmentism’.Footnote 102 An illustration of this process is the fact that Pastora Galván has not used the lyrics from the poem ‘Triana, Triana’ in all her danced tributes to Carmen la del Titi and has given her singers the freedom to perform different lyrics, as long as they conjured up the right atmosphere.Footnote 103
What makes the sung performance of ‘Triana, Triana’ in Lo Real noteworthy, then, is that it reverses the process of ‘fragmentism’ by casting a light on the historical and ideological context in which these lyrics were first written and performed. As Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh observe, from a historical perspective, all types of music ‘become subject to inevitable historical processes of reinterpretation and then reinsertion into the changing sociocultural formation’.Footnote 104 These scholars assert that the original context of certain musical borrowings will normally disappear, unless it is given presence by other means: ‘Whatever the original sociocultural and ideological connotations such borrowings may have carried will fade in due course, unless they are reproduced as a projection into the musical object by other, nonmusical forces.’Footnote 105 I would suggest, however, that the historical context of the poem ‘Triana, Triana’ acquire a renewed presence in Lo Real precisely through a set of very specific musical operations. Thus, while the artists largely follow the rhythmic cadence and melodic structures of Imperio Argentina's sung performance of the poem in Carmen, la de Triana, in Lo Real, the singer David Lagos phrases the words with over-affectionate precision. Similarly, the dancer Isabel Bayón uses her arms and feet to emphasize the rhythmic accents of the piano and guitar with excessive clarity. These musical features are all a clear reflection of ‘unisonance’, which is the term that Eva Woods Peiró, drawing on Benedict Anderson, uses to describe the ideological connotations of the pasodoble, a style whose stable, unsyncopated rhythm conjures up a military march and thus acquires a decidedly patriotic meaning.Footnote 106 In Lo Real, moreover, Bayón's movements on stage are repeatedly interrupted by authoritarian shouts from the musicians and, at one point, by a collective exclamation of the word España. These unsubtle gestures of mockery clearly allude to the similarities between the discipline of Bayón's dancing body and forms of military drill that were meant to uphold the pyramidal hierarchies of Francoist Spain.
Thus, through a parodic combination of song, dance, and instrumentation, these performers achieve a clear ‘projection’Footnote 107 of the ideological and historical forces that shaped the lyrics of ‘Triana, Triana’. Israel Galván's production shows that the emergence of a ‘restorative’ variety of nostalgia in Carmen, la de Triana and other Francoist musicals should be understood as a twofold operation: during this era, the construction of a mythicized and whitened ‘Gypsy’ figure went hand in hand with the infliction of violence on real Roma populations.
As the artists in Lo Real unravel these historical layers of meaning in the flamenco repertoire, they do not dismiss festivity altogether as a meaningful framework to engage with painful memories of systemic violence. While the performance of ‘Triana, Triana’ is a clear parody of state-sanctioned forms of festivity, the same section continues with the performance of various festive bulerías by different dancers, at different tempos, and on different parts of the stage. Here, in a clear overturn of Isabel Bayón's iconicity as a highly equipped performer of the Carmen role, other artists, such as Emilio Caracafé, Bobote, and La Uchi, who all live in Seville's southern polígono,Footnote 108 daringly take turns in protagonizing the party as singers and dancers, roles that not all of them are traditionally accustomed to. As Pedro G. Romero notes about the inclusion of these individuals, they represent ‘un extraño cuerpo de baile como el testimonio más directo de lo que odiaron Hitler y otros más recientemente. Galván los incluye porque representan precisamente la verdad de los gitanos, lo real, porque bailan tal como son, no actúan’ (‘a strange companion of dancers as a testimony of what Hitler, and others more recently, hated the most. Galván includes them precisely because they represent the truth of the Gitanos, “the real”, because they dance exactly as they are, they don't perform’).Footnote 109 These performances of joy and derision thus conjure up a variety of historical forms of systemic violence: the marginalization of Andalusian underclasses under Franco, which led to the construction of the polígonos now inhabited by these individuals, and also a wider history of violence against Roma populations in twentieth-century Europe. However, following Romero's words, these artists also give subtle embodiment to certain excess that speaks in many tongues and can perhaps never be fully appropriated or destroyed.
This search for daring new forms of embodied expression is clearly also what steers Galván's own interventions in Lo Real. In several sections of the piece, his body becomes a haunting shadow when he moves in intimate proximity with Isabel Bayón and Belén Maya, shaping and delimiting the scenic space that is available to his counterparts.Footnote 110 If Lo Real creates intricate connections between embodied performances, material objects, and complex soundscapes, then Galván's haunting presence on stage could be interpreted as an externalization of the authoritarian co-optations of flamenco that are still somehow present in the contemporary repertoire, albeit only tacitly. In that sense, while Lo Real engages with nostalgia through a lens of mockery and derision, it does not stop from staging the quest for memory as an active bodily process.
Conclusions
Triana, like other iconic urban locations that have shaped the history of flamenco, is a densely layered object with a long history of discursive representations and musical invocations. This article has gone in search for ways in which performances of nostalgic longing for Triana in flamenco acquire specific critical meanings in the context of post-dictatorial Spain. By analysing three interrelated case studies of flamenco dance from Seville, I have shown that nostalgic longing can be inhabited and reinhabited in radically different ways by different generations of artists. In these performances, Triana has meaningfulness both as an iconic urban location associated with authenticity and strong communitarian values and as a scenario of nostalgic festivity that mediates memories of systemic violence.
First, my reading of Triana pura y pura has shown how different ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ varieties of nostalgia can co-exist in discursive and embodied performances of memory. Comprising a musical performance and a retrospective filmic mediation on the significance of the original show, Triana pura y pura is reminiscent of earlier institutionalized forms of nostalgia in flamenco that were driven by an urge to safeguard past expressions of the art form. However, beyond this disputed aspect of Pachón's nostalgic take on the recent history of Triana, I have interpreted the festive scenes of flamenco dance that form the artistic kernel of Triana pura y pura as meaningful scenarios of embodied memories for those performers that protagonized them.
As Pastora Galván's recent work on the basis Triana pura y pura illustrates, the dance repertoire of an elderly generation of displaced artists still has a dynamic afterlife. In opposition, for example, to Matilde Coral's reluctance, as voiced in Triana pura y pura, to adopt elements from this unique dance vocabulary, Pastora Galván has shown how a creative approach to this tradition can enhance, rather than delimit, the expressive possibilities of flamenco. In the festive interlude of Israel Galván's Lo Real, moreover, flamenco operates as a deconstruction of a state-sanctioned, restorative type of nostalgia for Triana that permeated the musicals co-produced by Francoist Spain and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Lo Real, then, is a layered and experimental search for new musical and embodied vocabularies to voice memories of the repression of Andalusian underclasses under Franco, and of Roma populations elsewhere in twentieth-century Europe.
Despite the ongoing public, political, and scholarly debates about the unresolved legacy of the Franco dictatorship in Spain, the concrete experiences of segregation, marginalization, and repression suffered by the flamenco community under Franco have thus far not received widespread attention. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is the common association of flamenco with Francoism; that is to say, the assumption that flamenco was mostly a folkloric product of the regime, rather than a cultural field with a potential for critical contestation. Alternatively, the fact that flamenco has historically been criticized as an unspecific outcry of pain and longing may have restrained more nuanced views of the relations that this music holds with real experiences of hardship. As noted by Jesús López-Peláez, flamenco is commonly interpreted from a perspective of ‘essentialist flamencoism’, by which he means ‘an approach to flamenco that basically privileges its supposedly eternal and immutable nature, setting it apart from any material struggle, political interest or partisanship, and ideological agenda’.Footnote 111 Pedro Ordóñez Eslava has addressed the same issue, stating that the political ‘genetics’ of flamenco are often silenced in essentialist accounts of this art form.Footnote 112
As an alternative to those tendencies, I have addressed here the dynamics between different varieties of nostalgia in three festive performances of flamenco dance – that is to say, in a series of festive dance styles that, at surface level, evoke the folklorist stereotypes of flamenco that were widely promoted under Franco's dictatorial rule. As these case studies illustrate, even the most festive and jovial dance styles in flamenco contain meaningful echoes of a recent history of violence. Like other commemorative rituals and scenarios, flamenco fiestas affirm values in the here and now, but also conjure up previous gatherings from the past. Festive performances of dance and song, then, are a potentially rich source for future scholarship on the ways in which memories of painful experiences, and ongoing forms of longing for bygone places and eras, are artistically mediated.
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