Israel Galvàn “Arena”

Israel Galvàn
“Arena”
Mercat de les flors,
Barcelona, Spain
February 25, 2007

by Rita Felciano
copyright ©2007, Rita Felciano

Watching Israel Galvàn whip a pirouette and partner an upside down rocking chair is seeing Flamenco’s past and future in one somewhat stocky but furiously expressive dancer. Galvàn’s parents—they run a Flamenco school in Seville--and his sister Pastora take a more conventional approach to this popular art form. He is both a rebel and a traditionalist. At the Mercat de les flors, his latest show, “Arena,” packed in Flamenco lovers but even more so a young crowd that is as likely to attend a conventional Flamenco presentation as Sunday mass.

Spanish critics have nicknamed Galvàn the Nijinsky of Flamenco because of his spectacular technique. Galvàn is a phenomenal dancer, incredibly fast on his feet and with arms that rotate like gyroscopes and stab like stilettos. His stance in “Arena”, with his shoulders rounded, chin to chest is more like a bull’s than a bullfighter’s. In fact, in this show he is both.

Breathtaking as a dancer that he is, Galvàn is even more impressive as a choreographer and thinker about dance. He may be Nijinsky as a performer, but as dance maker he has more in common with William Forsythe. He dissects a traditional vocabulary and re-assembles it within fresh contexts to infuse new creative potential into an art form that some consider in danger of becoming desiccated. Not for him the large company productions with choreographies that stress unisons and a blunt showmanship that popularize Flamenco for all the wrong reasons. Yet Galvàn, for all his forays into multi-media and deconstructionism, remains a deeply traditional Flamenco artist, a soloist whose give and take with exceptional musicians fuels the burning core of his performance. Of course, he is not the only one rethinking Flamenco, but his is certainly a voice worth listening to.

According to the program notes “Arena’s” six sections are named after famous bulls that killed their matadors. But Galvàn looks at bullfighting less as bloody spectacle than as performance — its sense of space, of timing, of dramatic confrontations. Each of the six episodes has its own mood and musical emphasis. The choreography is abrupt, with short burst of ferocious energy that includes long pauses and silences. An arc of melancholy and introspection suggests death as a constant presence.

One of Galvàn’s brilliant ideas was a video (by Pedro G. Romero) which winds itself through the show. Again and again the camera returns to the great singer Enrique Morente, sitting in the tribune of a bullfight arena, singing his melancholic cante jondo. At his side is a serious young lad—Galvàn as it turns out. In these head shots Morente and Galvàn seem isolated from what is going on around them. You hear the roaring crowd, watch dozens of fascinated, bored, indifferent faces but you never see the ring itself. That action takes place on the stage of the Mercat de les flors.

The piece’s trajectory appears to follow a day in the life of or the career of a bullfighter. Galvàn starts a picture of innocence; he ends up a walking arsenal. In the opening ‘Bailador’, he is barefoot, in cut offs. He could be a country lad taking the measure of his first bull, and Poveda’s grand voice is accompanying him. He seems almost shy, a tremble crawling up his torso. When he lifts his arm overhead for a strike, his head sinks into his shoulders. The circling wrists with beautiful articulate fingers sometimes look tentative. Throughout the evening those hand gestures remain a wonder of visual speech. But Galvàn also circles, paws the ground and plants his feet, the torero imitating the bull. At one point he flattens his torso, his hands open to the side, and for a moment you see Nijinsky’s “Faun”, another wild creature.

In ‘Granaino,’ named after the bull that killed Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Lorcas’ poem, projected on screen, imposes its own tolling to Galvàn’s rhythmic contemplation. He sits in a white rocking chair beating out rhythms on the metal footrest, maybe contemplating what lies ahead of him. As he sets it in motion, the piece of furniture acquires its own life. When he turns it upside down, its sliders turn into the bull’s horns. On one level the image is almost too obvious but the power with which Galvàn attacks, embraces whips away from and pays homage to this “bull” is mesmerizing.

‘Pocapena’ starts on a musically lyrical note with fast contrasting footwork—including slaps to the bottom of his shoes—and wonderfully rich arms that stretch and cross, soar and stab. Joining the singers and lone guitarist Alfredo Lagos is Mercedes Bernal on the “Gaita del Gastor”, a non-pitched wind instrument made from a bull’s horn and commonly used in folk celebrations the world over. The give and take between the plaintive horn’s sighs and the dancer’s assertiveness appears spontaneous. This is a confrontation. Particularly intriguing in this section, which is full of abrupt stops, were pearly heel beats, which sent the dancer scooting along the floor like a passing train.

For ‘Burlero,” Diego Carrasco, a singer with rock and jazz in his voice, joined Galvàn in a jovial competition in which the older man appears to play a kind of trickster, trying to tease the dancer out of his introspection. Accompanied only by the also red-clad palmistas’ rhythmic hand claps, this section feels both ominous and fun. Carrasco’s lyrics include a semi-serious refrain—which he gets the audience to sing as well—“quien es importante la coleda, el toro o el torerador?” (What is important the tail, the bull or the bullfighter?).

For the penultimate ‘Playero’ Galvàn lugged two sandbags, which had been suspended like carcasses, onto his shoulders, to dump them in front of a wall, a replica of the one from behind which the bull is released into the ring. Some of the confrontation with the wall and the sandbags as dead bulls are a little pat but the interaction between Galvàn and fulminating jazz pianist Diego Amador approaches a level of terror. This is violence and mourning that shoots for the cosmic. Amador attacks the instrument with furiously percussive chords, using his lower arms and the inside of the piano for screaming dissonance.

For the finale, ‘Cantinero’ brings on a band that sounds like those playing at bullfights, festive and yet with a sense of inevitability to its tunes. Galvàn himself has become an arsenal of violence; he looks like a dirty street fighter with knives in his hands, on his legs, between his lips. He even clamps them to the soles of his shoes. His elegant hands brandish these weapons as what they designed to do, gore bodies, his own and the bull’s. It’s an almost surreal and just faintly ridiculous vision.

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