| 19 July 2010
What inspired the Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre to drop everything and work on a flamenco show? One man: Paco Peña.
When your reputation for excellence is as strong as Paco Peña’s, you don’t work with just anybody. So it comes as no surprise that the flamenco star’s choice of director is just as accomplished. Awarded an OBE in 1997 for services to theatre, Jude Kelly is one impressive woman. Currently Artistic Director of London’s Southbank Centre and a senior figure in the 2012 Olympics’ cultural programme, it’s remarkable she finds time to do anything else.
When you hear Kelly talk passionately about flamenco, however, it becomes obvious why she cleared space in her schedule to direct Peña’s upcoming festival show, Quimeras. “I love the intensity and detail of flamenco,” she explains, “and it’s fascinating the way it’s so embedded in Spanish culture. If you go to Spain, everybody knows flamenco – and after a performance you go to a bar and people carry on singing, dancing and clapping. It’s an extraordinary thing to see.”
It’s not just flamenco that Kelly admires, however. This is the fourth time she has directed one of Peña’s shows – what keeps her coming back for more? “We have a great sympathy for each other’s way of working,” says Kelly, “and we like searching through ideas and finding something truthful. There’s also something about putting together an evening musically and emotionally through dance that we both find fascinating. We’ve spent a lot of time talking and listening to each other, and Paco has an extraordinary knowledge of music and is very curious about trying out new things.”
As somebody used to working in the theatre, where the written word communicates so much, flamenco was a whole new challenge for Kelly. Few dance styles can claim to be as expressive as flamenco, however, which gave the director an interesting box of tools to work with. “Flamenco artists are dancers and singers, they’re not actors,” says Kelly. “So you have to work out how much you can communicate through them – because they’re not there simply to display their talent, but to express something that changes from mood to mood. So I’m very concerned with what the body and face look like, the gestures and what comes across without words. We’re communicating something abstract, though, and we’re not saying that at the end of the show the audience will know exactly what the thinking was. But we want them to feel they had an experience, an emotional journey and a really exciting evening.”
Inspired by the many immigrants Peña has seen arrive in Spain from Africa looking for a better life, Quimeras mixes straightforward narrative with a more atmospheric approach. The catalyst for the show was a news story Peña came across, in which an African immigrant was set on fire during an intense period of racial tension in Cataluña. But, as Kelly says, the underlying emotions in Quimeras could apply to pretty much anywhere, anytime. “Displacement is a story of humanity that’s always been there,” she says. “Being rejected, trying to find safety and discovering that place is no longer safe – these are things that all communities at some point have experienced. So we’re not telling one particular story from beginning to end, it will be fragments of a story that we’ll express out from.”
For Peña, being part of Spanish culture and observing how the social landscape has changed over the years has been a very personal period of research. So it was important for he and Kelly to learn how it feels to be on the other side of that – to leave your homeland and try to establish roots elsewhere, as portrayed by the African performers in Quimeras.
“On one level we’re trying to create a troupe who are telling one story together,” explains Kelly. “But at the same time, some of the performers need to represent the people who feel they have ownership of land – and the others are people who are seeking ownership. So our conversations with the African musicians and dancers has really informed the piece, because we’ve devised it with them.”
Despite the obvious sacrifice and hardship the immigrants go through, Peña and Kelly are determined that Quimeras should demonstrate the positive aspects of two cultures coming together. Fittingly, flamenco itself is a melting pot of cultures and styles, and is renowned for its ability to turn sorrow into celebration.
“The roots of flamenco are a combination of displacement and poverty and the need to find a way to express pain and community determination,” says Kelly. “But even if it’s forged from despair, it moves very quickly into something where the human spirit is just so joyful to be making art. Flamenco is incredibly flamboyant, technically awe-inspiring and sometimes, when you get two male dancers together, almost violently competitive. I don’t think any of the shows Paco and I have made together have ever been miserable, they’ve always been very life enhancing, and this one will be, too.”
Quimeras, Edinburgh Playhouse,
2-4 Sepember, 8pm
From £8, Tel: 0131 4732000
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