Dress-up & Flamenco

Día de las Cruces

Following Día de las Cruces was Día de las Madres (Mother’s Day is celebrated a week earlier). Katherine, Rosa and I went to church, being that it was a Sunday, and walk in to find every woman still in her traje de Gitano! Just like dolls, they handed us clothes, fixed our jewelry and we were transformed. How they love to document every event with at least 100 pictures (reminded me of Auntie Tracy), and then we enjoyed a delicious potluck with Mexican food too because one of the ladies, Marta, is from Mexico.

The origins of Flamenco is as mysterious as the disappearance of Amelia Earhart; it has to do with the expulsion of the Jews/Gypsies/Muslims from Andalucía back in the XXV and XXVII centuries, but somehow managed to have its debut in the XIX century…nobody really knows. To celebrate this aspect of Spanish culture, we attended the most marvelous Flamenco spectacle in the same theater we saw the epic pop/rock concert. The rhythm of the singers was mesmerizing; two men (the “cantaors” or “singers”) sat at a wooden table and almost had a conversation in song while maintaining the most unusual tapping of their knuckles on the wood. One could not even follow the hand movements of the guitarist they were so intricate, and then the bailaor “dancer” entered the stage. She had at least four dress changes, but the most impressive was a metallic, gold dress with an outrageously long train. Not only was she manipulating her train, keeping the hand movements going AND creating a rhythm with her heels, she managed to grab a shawl and dance with that—it left us all astounded and wanting to learn Flamenco just like a kid wants to become James Bond after seeing Casino Royale.