Manolete:King of the Gypsies

photos courtesy Paula Keller

Flamenco is an art form dedicated to nuances, brisk gestures, silences, and disquieting cries that make us shudder a little inside. At any rate, they ought to. The shoulders, the belly, the hips, the turn of the head—a good deal of training and discipline go into the movements, no doubt, but something else is also at work. Call it a beautiful rage, if you will. At its best flamenco becomes a scourge. What have we done to deserve such punishment? We haven't lived deeply enough.

There is plenty of energy and pleasure to be found in flamenco too, of course, but restlessness and anguish are never far beneath the surface. To get the balance right is never easy. Only occasionally do we come face to face with a performer for whom the restless anguish and the defiant exuberance are part and parcel of a single mode of behavior, an art and a vision that's noble and self-contained, yet at the same time redolent of innumerable generations of suffering. Those who attended the performances of Manolete at the Southern Theater were granted such an experience.

With curly black locks framing his chiseled face, and accompanied by two musicians from his home-town of Granada, Manolete brought fire, nimbleness, and grace to a very traditional selection of playes performed in collaboration with members of Zorongo Dance Theater.

Why did this gypsy dancer from the caves of Granada chose to spend a week in a remote outpost like Minneapolis? To answer that question, we might ask ourselves another one: Why was Susana di Palma, a young woman from Minneapolis, touring with flamenco groups in Spain circa 1965?

Di Palma went to Madrid as a youngster to study classical Spanish dance, but caught the “flamenco” bug. Already a talented dancer and fluent in Spanish, she worked with several gypsy groups, including one led by guitarist Juan Maya Marote, Manolete's older brother.

Flamenco is as much “lived” as “taught,” and its time-honored forms and semi-improvisational nature lend themselves well to the shifting constellations of families, troupes, and traditions within which young performers develop their skills. Before long di Palma had studied and performed with more than a few top-notch flamenco artists. But being neither Spanish nor gypsy, her options remained limited, and she eventually returned to Minneapolis, married guitarist Michael Hauser, and began performing with him at local venues. Eventually di Palma's interest in the theatrical side of flamenco led her to form her own group, Zorongo, both to teach and to produce shows in which social conscience and modernist choreography put traditional flamenco forms to more broadly expressive ends. She also performed widely with other groups, and it was while doing a show with Manolete in Miami two years ago she convinced the fabled dancer to pay a visit to Minneapolis.

Manolete's career has all the hallmarks of a flamenco biopic. He was born into a gypsy family in the caves of the Sacromonte district of Granada, and was dancing regularly in cafes by the age of four. As a teen he followed his guitarist-brother to Madrid to launch a career as a professional dancer. It was an exciting time for flamenco dance, with luminaries such as Antonio Gades, Mario Maya and El Güito working to graft elements of ballet and modern dance onto traditional forms while retaining the gravity, inwardness, and disconsolate fury without which flamenco can easily plummet into absurdity and farce. Manolete came of age in the midst of it all, rose to prominence, toured widely, and spent several years teaching and performing in Japan.

With the appearance of Antonio Canales, Joaquín Cortés, and other young dancers during the 80s, Manolete eventually assumed the position of an aging master, rather than an innovative upstart. Yet in a field where every novelty may be greeted with the skeptical response, “Nice, yes... but is it flamenco?” such figures are not only respected, but venerated, and Manolete remained in high demand as both a performer and an instructor.

Scott “Matteo” Davies, a guitarist and long-time fixture on the local flamenco scene, has accompanied Manolete during three of the dancer's recent visits to Chicago. “I consider it a high-point of my career,” he says. “The first night I performed with him the atmosphere on stage was so charged, so electric, that when the piece was over I had no recollection of what had taken place. I had to go back stage and down a glass of whisky just to get my feet back on the ground.”
Di Palma herself has studied with Manolete intermittently for more than two decades. “Manolete represents the essence of the art form,” she says. “He has...” and here she pauses to choose exactly the right phrase, “...aristocratic elegance. He is simply the king of the gypsies.”

For their shows at the Southern Theater Di Palma and her collaborators assembled a well-paced series of numbers to showcase both Zorongo's and Manolete's talents, starting off with a blacksmith's song accompanied only by clapping and the pounding of two canes on the wood floor of the stage. Manolete followed with a farruca, his signature piece. Originally a sober dance from the northern province of Galicia, the farruca became, once the flamencos of Andalusia got a hold of it in the mid-nineteenth century, a male solo vehicle, with slow pacing, abrupt turns from statuesque positions, and short interludes of fierce zapateado . Since taking it up for a show in Seville with singer Enrique Morente in 1983, it has become a mainstay of Manolete's repertoire, and audiences at the Southern were transfixed once again by his subtle stop-and-go interpretation.

In other parts of the show singer Jonatan Cortés explored the mesmerizing harmonies of a taranta, and Zorongo majas Deborah Elias and Sachiko joined de Palma in a spirited alegrias, with New York guitarist Pedro Cortez and singer Jesus Montoya providing gritty and energetic accompaniment.

The show concluded with Manolete on stage once again, wearing a white suit and polka dot tie, to do an extended series of turns and passes with absolute aplomb. Never cracking a smile, focused on the inner core where fierce emotion manifests itself in the most subtle posturing and footwork, he carried the audience through one climax after another before the entire cast returned to the stage for a good-natured party-like finale.
Performances of the caliber served up by Manolete are seldom seen in these parts, and we are much obliged to Susana di Palma, Zorongo Dance Theater, and our local community of artists and aficionados who drew him here. Yet on any given night, we might happen upon a hardly less gripping flamenco performances at La Bodega, the Loring Pasta Bar, Conga, or some other venue. Armed with an events calendar, we could make it a point to do so.