A Ferocious Tablao
On flamenco, fierce women, and what we're afraid the world will train out of our daughters.
She stands under the unnatural blue light, hands overhead, not moving, for what feels exaggeratedly long. The guitarist has tuned his instrument. I can’t tell if Rosanna Terracciano is playing with us or waiting for something.
It’s a Wednesday night in June, the Yardbird Suite. The evening is intentionally intimate. The house manager has introduced the company as all from the prairies. The musicians sit to one side, Peter Mole on guitar and the singer Francisco Orozco, who goes by Yiyi, a small bird of a man with a haunting love call in the Spanish tradition. The stage is tiny, maybe six by ten feet. The others who aren’t dancing yet sit in wood chairs beside them as a cuadro, accenting the rhythm with their palmas, their heel stomps, their calls. They become support to each other. Each strike of a heel on the tablao, the wooden platform built for percussion, echoes through the room. Beside me is my twelve-year-old daughter.
I brought her to see how we push the overwhelming emotion that bursts out of us into movement. She’s at the cusp of those feelings, moving into the next stage of girlhood, the awkward in between, not a woman by any means but not a little one either. She’s looking for her place, aware of herself in the world.
I had it once; the fierceness, power. I’ve taken note to mute it every time a man has called me difficult. I’ve quieted myself when curiosity comes off as contempt. I am tired of passion in an argument becoming sexualized. Anger isn’t meant to be sexy.
The first escape I learned was dance. It was a moment in a modern piece choreographed by a Martha Graham follower. She wanted us to be like jungle cats, unafraid of the audience, daring them to stare back. This isn’t the space for pasted smiles. I could put all of myself into that piece, taking on the entire dark auditorium before me with my stare. There’s no way to explain it but to show it. Tonight I’m in the audience, and I’m compelled. I want to be like them.
Rosanna begins to move. It starts small, a slow build. She wears a white blouse and a high-waisted black skirt so long I don’t see her heeled shoes until she swishes it. She moves a little faster, until her hands and feet break into a flurry of zapateado, and then she’s done. She’s the quieter one, vulnerable, less forceful, a balance, and her restraint is intentional, the soft side of these big feelings. She carries us deep into the story of the movement. By the end of her set she’s warmed the crowd. There was a story, but I feel I’ve missed a piece of the plot.
Then Jane Ogilvie, stunningly silver-haired, moves as if pushing through water, the slowness intentional, and we’re stuck on it. A mountain lion stalking. This is flamenco of the prairies. Her hands cast a spell. The blue light catches each turn, each flick against the black backdrop. She holds me with the smallest movement, and as it grows to fill the room, my body beats her rhythm. Her body has substance. I don’t know how to watch dance without taking in the shape of the body, and obviously this is an industry of putting a body up for consumption. But these were women, with their curves and their strength and their bodies there to take space, to demand it. The space is theirs, filled by an enraptured audience and the sounds of another place.
They’re not dainty, not perfect, not the homogenized online form of beauty. Strong features, hair in a braid or a loose bun, a fringed mantón dancing along with them, long skirts that take texture in the light, flowers in the hair, large earrings. Traditional, not the too-tight polyester we’re accustomed to in other dance forms. It’s refined without being over-polished, the room thick with what the flamencos call duende. To dare to express sharp feelings. Not to smile. Smiling would be unfitting to the piece. I was a witness to their expression. They were dancing for themselves while dancing for us.
Between sets, Yiyi sings with a plain joy, and I imagine the admiration he holds for whoever the song is about. Peter Mole is having fun, tossing his hair with the music, trading the rhythm back and forth with Yiyi and calling out.
Claire Marchand dances last. She’s the one who has lived in my mind since I saw her a year ago. Dark hair, dark eyes, a square jaw, unsmiling. She is her gaze, the way she looks past us into the world she’s pulling us into. Anger, lust, love, tenderness, carried most clearly through the dance with the abanico, the fan, the heart fluttering like a heartbeat. She offered it up, exposed it, swirled around it, and kept it close to her chest. I wonder how much is improvised and how much is planned. There’s room to feel and play inside the compás. At the end the three of them take the floor together, a fin de fiesta, otherworldly. These are women not smiling. Until the end when they come together, the night complete.
Where are these women in our lives, the aunties and mothers and teachers who could show us how to live? They dare to express, to be loud, to be intense, to expose that they carry love and passion and heartbreak and rage. These dancers have a place for it, somewhere to put their fear, their anger, their love, their life, and harness it into movement. Because it lives in the dance, it need not boil under the surface. They transmute it into something, they create magic with it, they transfix us. This is art. For the women who have no place, repression becomes rage. It makes us ill. It makes us combust. Or we fade away slowly, bitter and resentful. We all need the something. I want each of my daughters to find her something.
Beside me, my eldest has her arm slung back over her chair. She’s turned her body to face the stage head-on, away from the table, because she wants a clear view of the footwork. She fiddles with her hands, mouths her juice glass, and at times maybe she’s less engaged. But she doesn’t want to leave when the lights come up. It’s our night out together. She knows fierce woman, though I don’t know if she knows it. I am afraid the world will train this out of her.