Fino & Flamenco
Like all great wines of the world, Sherry has it's own dance. And it is profoundly wonderful. (Actually, we don't know of that many great wines that have their own dance. But they should) By Kate.
I am entirely passionate about sherry. Yet the real reason I want to come back to Jerez
We always go to a place in the old part of the city for dinner. This is friendly, but rough. A square room with grubby walls and worn furniture faces a small stage on which a group of empty chairs stare out at us.
We do not come here for the food which is generally very basic and while not revolting, certainly not memorable. It was better this time though – mounds of fresh salad, cheese, prawns in garlic, fried fish; all good, washed down with Romate’s Fino. Not my favourite but could have been a lot worse.
The dancing seems to start later this time and the apart from one, the dancers are not the same as they were last year. Two large, swarthy women in the bar, one dragging savagely on a cigarette seem as though they may mutate into performers, but I hope not. It just seems too unlikely.
I really should know better by now. The transformative power of Flamenco is extraordinary. They are indeed part of the dancers and on stage, backs arched, heads back, they are beautiful. The course quality off-stage is still there but it belongs now; giving their dancing a different, exotic flavour.
First there is a song and then the dancing begins.
The bodies of the women move against an unseen force, straining and shifting against its weight. Their feet beat out rhythms of defiance. The smack of shoes on the bare boards, clapping of hand against hand and occasionally thigh or chest weave through the call of the song and the intricate guitar. It makes me cry, every time. It is as though someone is playing the rhythm of life and it is unbearably hard but still, always, there is a dance which can be danced to it.
The Spanish believe in Duende – dark magic, inspiration, spirits, the magnetism of fire. A direct translation seems impossible. Real Flamenco will create Duende, The sound of the voice and the rhythm conjures up a connection to a force so powerfully real, it is almost unbearable. The Spanish Poet, Frederico Garcia Lorca has said :-
Tonight, there was Duende. The voice of the singer moved the air like a Sirocco round the room. The women danced with a fervour that seemed ancient and ageless. Now, extravagantly erotic and tauntingly sensual; now haughty and full of furious heat, their feet thrashing rhythms, their arms proud as cobras. The sounds were a lament of defiant sorrow, sound like a rushing torrent, as though echoing off distant, treacherous mountains.
The dancers and musicians duly took their bows and as they did so, she toddled up on to the stage, to her mother.
Jerez Jacobs Creek
The dancing seems to start later this time and the apart from one, the dancers are not the same as they were last year. Two large, swarthy women in the bar, one dragging savagely on a cigarette seem as though they may mutate into performers, but I hope not. It just seems too unlikely.
"These dark sounds are the mystery, the roots thrusting into the fertile loam known to all of us, ignored by all of us, but from which we get what is real in art. . . .
The dancers and musicians duly took their bows and as they did so, she toddled up on to the stage, to her mother.
