Eva Yerbabuena Ballet Flamenco Eva Credits 10 Programme 13 Choreographer s Notes Feature 14 She ll Put a Spell on You 16 Eva Yerbabuena 30 Cover image and photograph above Jose Luis Alvarez 2-4.3.2006 Grand Theatre Hong Kong Cultural Centre 1 20 Running time: approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes with no interval To make this performance a pleasant experience for the artists and other members of the audience, PLEASE switch off your alarm watches, MOBILE PHONES and PAGERS. Eating and drinking, unauthorised photography and audio or video recording are forbidden in the auditorium. Thank you for your co-operation.
Credits Creative Team Ballet Flamenco Eva Yerbabuena Choreography and Direction Paco Jarana Music Jesús Calluela Musical Arrangement Dancers Eva Yerbabuena Mercedes de Córdoba María Moreno Luis Miguel González Eduardo Guerrero Juan Manuel Zurano Sonia Poveda Asunción Pérez Alejandro Rodríguez 10
Musicians Pepe de Pura Singer Enrique Soto Singer Jeromo Segura Singer Paco Jarana Guitar Manuel de la Luz Guitar Manuel José Muñoz Percussion Ignacio Vidaechea Flute and Saxophone Production Team Daniel Estrada Stage Manager Raúl Perotti Lighting Manu Meñaca Sound Technician Jimena San Román Costumes and Wardrobe Esther Vaquero Cristobal Ortega Producer Marta Carranza Eva s Personal Assistant Begoña Cervera Shoes Eva Yerbabuena S L Production With the Support of The Asian tour is produced by Flamenco Festival Inc 11
Programme - Intro 1 Eva Toná Rarapata (Bulerías) Torre de la Vela (Granaína) De la Cava (Seguirilla) Del Puente (Soleá) Tiempo al Tiempo (Percusión) Chirrín-Malacatín (Tangos) Intro 2 Eva Javier Suarez 13
Eva Knut Strand / Bergen Tidende
Choreographer s Notes - I am alone, in silence. Music plays on a crackling old gramophone. It tells me that flamenco voices, sounds, instruments, movements have long been a supreme expression of feeling without rules or limits. Travelling in time, I move towards an awareness of something in which I had long believed: the timelessness of flamenco. I feel flamenco s different song-forms within me they fill my body, not only with their name and form, but also with freedom. bulerías entitled Rarapata kicked and stamped, inside me when I was born... a granaína entitled Torre de la Vela, free and arrhythmic, in which the ruffled train of my dress carries memories of Granada: the light framed by its skylights; its green aromas; its plasterwork sacred to the touch; the gentle tinkling of water, ceaselessly trickling and dripping... a seguirilla: the essence of purity... the soleá, from Triana, from its bridge... the voice drops away and Tiempo al Tiempo starts: verbless dance, hard blows... Chirrín-malacatín, a popular Seville expression, tells us that something is drawing to a close and it comes through tangos that reveal my inner self, rebelling against convention, as a flame that sets my body in motion... The light dies, the sound fades, the shapes disappear and I find myself alone, dizzy in shadowy darkness, with a new and different knowledge... the realisation that flamenco also exists in time... It is simply the courage to leave one s heart open to what life brings. 15
16 1987 Feature
17 1960 2001 7 16
18 Jose Luis Alvarez
She ll Put a Spell on You by Mike Figgis Eva Yerbabuena is an extraordinary artist and she s unique. She will not disappoint you. She might even change you in a small way, the way a great artist changes the way we look at the world. She certainly changed the way I look at it. Eva starred in a documentary I made, Flamenco Women. I sent it to William Forsythe, the great American ballet choreographer, and he said that it changed the way he and his company looked at dance. It inspired them to use more heart and less intellect. Flamenco is a difficult subject to write about. There are many theories about where it came from. I once tried to read up on the subject but found it too complex. The most important thing about flamenco is simply to experience it. And it s very easy to do just that. You turn up at a venue and, well, experience it. The first time I experienced flamenco was in Madrid in 1987. I was there promoting a film, Stormy Monday, and the Spanish distributor arranged, at my request, a visit to a flamenco club. The audience was 100% tourists, mainly German and Japanese, and they talked all the way through. But for me it was electric. I watched enraptured as the evening played out. On several occasions I found myself weeping, once as a skinny teenage girl turned her back on the audience and did amazing things with castanets. After performing the equivalent of a roll on a snare drum, she took the tempo and the volume slowly down to zero. For one moment there was a stunned silence, then she whipped around and faced the audience for her final punctuation before walking off the tiny stage to let the next performer on. I d never seen women like this in my life. They seemed to be so proud of their own gender and the sexuality and sensuality that is female without having to compromise it in any way for a male audience. It struck me that flamenco was about women. There were men dancing, and the guitarists are always men but the women seemed to be stronger and more expressive. I resolved there and then to make a film about female flamenco. It took me 10 years but I did finally get it together. At a film festival a few years later, I met Pedro Almodovar. One of the many things I admire about his films are the strong roles that he gives to women. He explained that Spain is a female culture and that the best actors in Spain are women. The first time I saw Eva was on a bad VHS copy of a recording of a show she was doing at the time. I was looking for two main female dancers for the documentary I was trying to make. I was very impressed by what I could make out and immediately invited her to participate in the film. These initial negotiations were tricky because the world of flamenco is rife with suspicion and competition. The stars of flamenco are always being ripped off by bad management. So the early stages were a bit delicate. Luckily I found a valuable ally and researcher, Vicky Heywood, an Englishwoman living in Spain who had become a friend and supporter of many 19
flamenco artists. I d read an article she'd written for a women s magazine about women in flamenco and got in touch. She then negotiated with the artists on my behalf. Eva agreed to be in the film and turned up on the first day of filming. My first impression was that she thought I was a fool. She showed little expression at anything I said. I found myself struggling for dignity in the face of this impassive, striking woman. Slowly we found a way of communicating. I stopped talking and she started dancing. In some ways flamenco is like jazz. Both are art forms that have grown out of poor minority sections of the community. Flamenco is the art of the Gypsies in Spain and jazz started as the music of black slaves in the American south. Louis Armstrong s famous comment about jazz, Either you dig it or you don t, is also true for flamenco. Either you are moved by it or you are not. Flamenco is not something you can be cool about, something a critic can analyse in terms of pure technique, because a very old woman who is overweight and slow can still be superbly flamenco. Being flamenco is a way of life but it s not exclusive. Anyone can turn up and be a part of it for the moment. But a big difference between flamenco and jazz is that flamenco has held on to its roots. Jazz unfortunately gave up the ghost back in the 1960s. One of the main reasons that flamenco has remained so pure is that it has never really been absorbed into the mainstream in the way that jazz has. It saddens me to hear so-called jazz radio these days; what you get is up-market hotel lobby muzak. Jazz should still be ripping your guts out the way flamenco does. Eva is rooted in the tradition of flamenco dance but also fascinated by the world that is not flamenco. She can improvise to anything but you will always know that she is flamenco. When we were filming she did a very strange thing. We were rehearsing and there was a competitive vibe in the air. One of the other dancers was showing off a bit, fast feet and smoking a cigarette at the same time. We were all impressed by this and to be fair to this other dancer, she was pretty damn good. Eva quietly got up and did a kind of thing tai chi with her arms. It s on film and I ve studied the moment many times. She defines a small space in which she is about to perform. And then she performs. A truly great artist never overstates. Eva then did a couple of moves that were so stunning yet seemed so simple. But it was clear to everyone in the room that she was operating on a higher plain than everyone else. I invited Eva back into my film world this year. I was making an improvised digital film in Venice with about 40 actors. I wanted to have Eva in the film because I knew she would give some flamenco heart to the proceedings. I also wanted to share my admiration for her with a wider audience. She and Paco, her brilliant guitarist husband, turned up and in due course performed on film. Burt Reynolds was also doing a small cameo in the film, and I asked him to play the part of the manager of a small touring flamenco troupe. I showed the rushes the next day to the assembled cast and it is a stunning tour de force, eight minutes of magic. It finished and pretty much everyone was in tears and clapping as if there was no tomorrow. Even Eva was crying but I think that was because we were all crying. Flamenco will do that for you. It will tear your heart out. If you watch a good flamenco singer, he will beat his heart with a clenched fist during an emotional passage of a song. The Guardian, 16 July 2001 21
30 197012 1998 1997 2001 2002 2002 2003 2001 Eva Yerbabuena Biography
Eva Yerbabuena is regarded as one of the most important female dancers and choreographers in flamenco today. Born in 1970, she started dancing at the age of 12 with Enrique el Canastero, Angustillas la Mona, Mariquilla and Mario Maya in Granada. She moved to Seville to study dramatic art with Juan Furest and Jesús Domínguez, and later went to Havana, Cuba, to study choreography with Johanes García. Before founding her own company in 1998, she worked with such renowned flamenco dancers as Rafael Aguilar, Javier Latorre, Manolete, Merche Esmeralda and Javier Barón. She has performed at the Biennial Flamenco Festival of Seville with el Pele in the productions Desde la memoria and El amor brujo. Jose Luis Aluarez In 1997 she was featured in Flamenco Women, a documentary by Mike Figgis. She has toured Europe and Latin America, collaborated with el Güíto and Carmen Linares, and been billed alongside Mikhail Baryshnikov. Yerbabuena has achieved international recognition for her appearances at the Seville Biennial and as a guest artist with the Spanish National Ballet. She has received the most important flamenco dance awards including the Premio Flamenco Hoy, the biennial awards for best performance and best dancer, and the 2001 Premio Nacional de Danza, Spain s highest honour in dance. In 2002, Yerbabuena was awarded the UK Dance Critics Special Award for Excellence and she performed at Sadler s Wells, London, where she won the Time Out, 2002 Best Performance of the Year. In October 2002 she premiered her show La voz del silencio, at the 12th Biennial Flamenco Festival in Seville, and was proclaimed Best Dancer and Best Performer of the Biennial. In 2003, Ballet Flamenco Eva Yerbabuena performed in the most prestigious theatres and festivals of Europe, such as the Théâtre de la Ville and the Théâtre Chaillot (France), the Woking Dance Festival and the Rosson-Wye International Festival (UK), the Bergen Festival (Norway) and the Palermo Festival (Italy). She has also performed extensively in Latin America. Yerbabuena s future plans include a tour throughout Spain and the participation in major international summer festivals including the Biennial Flamenco Festival of Seville and the Pina Bausch s Wuppertal Festival with Ana Lagnuna, Sylvie Guillem and Vladimir Malakhov among others. 31