Ole!

On Wednesday I attended a flamenco performance in the Casa de la Memoria in el Barrio Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is Sevilla's historic Jewish quarter (Juderia). As with other old Jewish neighborhoods I have visited in Europe (such as Josefov in Prague), the area is both beautiful and tragic. Beauty lies in the grace of the structures and the art that have been preserved over centuries; sadness lingers in the realization that these neighborhoods are not living, breathing communities but museums. (In the case of Josefov, the neighborhood was rather morbidly and expressly intended to be a museum of an extinct race.) There are still people and businesses in the Barrio Santa Cruz of course, but now, so many generations after expulsion of the Jewish people and reclamation of the physical space and culture by the majority society, you have to listen closely to hear even the whispers of the Jewish community that once was.

Contemporary Santa Cruz is primarily a touristic neighborhood, replete with small hotels, tapas bars, restaurants and photo-snapping tourists. I arrived at the Casa de la Memoria a few minutes early and decided to stroll through the neighborhood. Along the way I encountered a church with doors carved intricately in the Moorish style. These decorative doors were reinforced by the ubiquitous metal-stud-reinforced wooden gates of all Sevillan churches. Making doors battering ram proof was all the rage before surveillance cameras entered the market. Thank goodness the old ways are obscure and Baroque. No need to fix them. Ba-dum-cha.

Back at the Casa de la Memoria, the flamenco performance was stirring! The space was a rather beautiful patio in the center of an 18th century townhouse. The show began after sunset, and as a result the photos are dark and don't quite capture the wonderfully romantic lighting. I imagined the lady of the house wrapped in an oversized embroidered shawl, watching from her second story balcony as the action unfolded on the patio below. The performers included a guitarist, a singer and a dancer. The show started with a quietly intricate Spanish guitar song. Soon, the guitar was joined by the plaintive but unwaveringly masculine voice of the singer. Finally, the dancer emerged. The synergy between guitar, singer and dancer was palpable. When the guitarist indulged in complex riffs, the singer and dancer murmured encouragement or clapped in rhythm. The dancer would then erupt in movement, an eddy of pain, love, flirtation and fury with moods punctuated by percussive feet and stoked by the musicians' calls of encouragement. Curiously, the dancer did both traditionally male and female styles of dance (and changed her costumes accordingly). La Zambra (the dancer) had superhumanly fast feet and an intensely emotive mien http://lazambra.es/.

The performance only strengthened my resolve to take flamenco classes here in Sevilla!