National Holiday

What started as a quiet working at home day turned into much more...

I knew that October 12 was the Día de la Hispanidad in Spain (formerly, in the Franco years, the Día de la Raza) and it became clear over the course of this week that it was a rather larger holiday than I had imagined, or than its equivalent Columbus Day in the US.  One of my fellow Fulbrighters told me that a professor she was working with had told her that the disgusting display of air power that I assumed was the central government flexing its muscles the week before last was not courtesy of Catalunya but rather a practice for the parade today, and my Madrid friends said that they thought it was unusual tact on the part of the central government to not include tanks in the parade this year.  (Seriously, tanks?  In a holiday parade?  WTF, Spain?  I suppose it's better than giving them to their local police departments the way the US does, but it still strikes me as weird.)  The afternoon TV news over the last couple of days has covered "operación salida" for what is for many people a four day weekend here (schools are off Friday as well), complete with notices about the extra holiday trains, planes, and buses starting Wednesday evening, and interviews with extremely happy members of the hotel industry, who are practically salivating since the prolonged summer temperatures that are probably a herald of global doom also mean that the hotels on the beach in Cádiz and Alicante are at near 100% occupancy this year, while everyone takes advantage of the equivalent of Labor Day six weeks later, for a last long beach weekend.  There were also shocked and disapproving notices about how businesses and (even more scandalously) ayuntamientos in Catalunya were showing defiance by refusing to close today.  Since I find closed businesses annoying, and since everyone here is super aware of the way this holiday is tied to the dictatorship anyway (the war planes and tanks are kind of an obvious clue), my sympathies are with the Catalans on this one.  (Mind you "closed" here is a relative concept.  Schools and government buildings are.  To my surprise my local and much beloved Mercadona was tightly shuttered, but the Dia Maxi supermarket by my friends in Aluche was open.  Small family owned businesses run by Spaniards were shut, but run by immigrants were open.  Restaurants were open as a matter of course.  So it's complicated.)

In any case, archives were definitely closed, so I planned to spend the day writing, and possibly cleaning up a little.  That plan changed fairly early in the day, when my Aluche friends called and invited me to have lunch, and then go to a flamenco concert with them in the evening "if we can get tickets."


I accepted (why turn down paella and good conversation?) and we ended up getting the tickets in person at the box office, due to technical difficulties with getting them online (namely the printer having no ink cartridges, and the store to buy them being closed).  As this was a special three-day only tribute concert, there were few tickets left, so we went to the box office as soon as it opened, at 6:30, and managed to snag three tickets.  As the show was at 8:30, and we were close to the Reina Sofia, we wandered over to the art museum, which of course had free admission today for the "fiesta nacional."  (Pro tip: Always go to the back entrance of the Reina Sofia, on the Ronda de Atocha.  There is no line, even when the lines for the front entrance stretch all around the plaza.)  We had just over an hour, which was just time to look at one of their temporary exhibitions, a collection of modern Spanish artists from a recently closed gallery, the Soledad Lorenzo collection.  I was super-impressed by one artist in particular, Pablo Palazuelo, who my friend (who is an art historian) explained was one of a group of artists who were interested in abstraction focused on geometric forms rather than color, and who did a series of pencil drawings based on mathematical repetitions that are basically hand drawn versions of the beginnings of fractals (with straight lines before they become curves).  The sequence called El número y las aguas was really both mathematical and eerily evocative of the ocean.

Then it was on to the concert.  As I said, it was a special tribute to one artist, Pepe Habichuela, and his "60 Years of Flamenco Guitar" with lots of invited guests (who are mostly family members of his one way and another)  Here's the preview:

It took place in the Teatro Circo Price, which was originally a circus, and still has the orchestra seats in what was the ring.  We were toward the back of the first tier of seats above the "ring," fairly to one side, and thus fairly close to the stage, which is at the level of the first row of the first tier.  The happy circus atmosphere was preserved by having people bring in their large plastic cups of beer from the concession stand downstairs, and by any number of small children (including a little girl of about six years old a few seats down from us who had clearly just come from her dance class, wearing her ankle length black flamenco practice skirt, a pink leotard, and tiny flamenco heels, and with her hair on the top of her head in a bun).  My Aluche friends were also impressed by the number of audience members who had "un aspecto muy gitano, o muy flamenco" by which they meant women dressed to kill in long tight dresses and spike heels, and men in suits.  There were also a fair number of audience members in jeans, so it was a nice crowd, mixed in appearance as well as of all ages, though almost all local, with the exception of the pair of French tourists behind me (who I became aware of because one of them was translating everything the emcee said to the other, as best as she could).

After a leisurely fifteen minute grace period to get people mostly seated the show began with the emcee saying "buenas noches, familia" and adding immediately that of course we would be thinking that he wasn't a cousin or an in-law or anything, but that "el flamenco es una gran familia."  That kind of set the tone for the whole evening.  (During a later moment when he appeared to talk to the audience while the stage hands were moving chairs and adjusting microphones he was greeted with a cry from the audience, "guapo!"  "That woman has cataracts," he commented cheerfully.)  The artists all agreed that they were there to celebrate the 60 years of Pepe Habichuelo's career because "you should do tributes to people while they're alive, so they can be there to enjoy it, and you can enjoy them" and added that "when you say someone has been doing something for 60 years that's a way of saying you want them to do it for as many more."  While the latter may be optimistic, the closest I can come in atmosphere was a Carnegie Hall concert, where the audience knows the songs, and loves the performer already, and where there's a cheerful connection between them from the first.

The music, of course, was incredible, and the audience was clearly knowledgeable.  (There were several times when the applause at the end of a solo settled not into the slightly frightening unison typical of northern Europe but rather into an actual pattern that mimicked the performers doing palmas on stage, and there were lots of people who easily recognized the end of fairly complicated phrases and were able to shout olé as encouragement at the right moments.)  The more I see and hear (or hear and see?) flamenco the more I realize that the division between dance and music is not only artificial but arbitrary.  Most of the singers sit on the edge of their chairs, and sway back and forth with emotion.  When they are not using their hands to clap they very naturally gesture with them (because they're singing words, and it's pretty difficult for Spaniards to use words without using their hands in normal conversation), and obviously if they're gesturing with their hands they have to keep the rhythm going by tapping their feet, and if you want to emphasize different beats in a rhythm (say one and three of a six beat rhythm) obviously it makes sense to count the emphasized beat with your whole foot and the minor ones with your heels, or vice-versa.  So if you're stamping your feet and your heels and swaying back and forth and gesturing with your arms and hands, you kind of might as well be dancing, even if you're technically sitting down.  (The convention actually seems to be when the guitars and percussion are following the singer that the way they know to end a piece is when the performer stands up, and turns his back to the audience.)  Similarly, the dancers use both feet and hands so much as percussion that it's more whole-body music than just movement.  I understand from one of my fellow Fulbrighters who is a flamenco guitarist that actually any member of a flamenco group can be the "leader" (the guitarist, the percussionist, the singer, or the dancer, although generally the guitar functions as the backbeat, and the percussion takes the lead among musicians, which is what makes it different from other types of music).  As with any really good improvisation, it was of course impossible to tell who was "leading" although the obvious assumption was that it was the featured performer, who then had backup.  During one performance one of my friends (who had brought along binoculars to see the stage up close) leaned over after looking through them intently and whispered to me "the guitarist and percussionist are cracking up.  I wonder what he" (the featured singer) "said to them?"  Since it had struck me that said singer was a bit of a clown in his body language, I could well believe that he deliberately communicated some joke.  However, based on years of band performances, I also wonder if perhaps they were cracking up because they had in fact screwed up a syncopation or similar, and were nobly continuing and desperately trying to recover, while also having the giggles.  They finished with a flourish, and if there was a screw-up, nothing but their amusement betrayed them.

I had been thinking that there was little difference between the music and the dance, so I was amused when one of the singers, la Niña Pastori, actually sang a refrain that kind of confirmed that there was no difference.  "A mi niña yo le canto, yo le canto e yo le bailo."  Literally, "I sing to my little girl.  I sing to her and dance to her."  Thinking about it, it is as natural to dance to a fussy baby as to sing to it, because obviously you have to rock it, and if you're rocking and singing obviously you have to move your feet, and you're back to having no difference.  (I was also amused by the song since just before Niña Pastori's appearance on stage the guitarists and percussionists came out and sat down and in the expectant hush as the spotlights came on a small but determined voice from the audience yelled "olé mi padre."  Points to the musicians for the pros they are for none of them showing visible embarrassment when the entire theater laughed.)

After a few songs there were calls for an encore by Niña Pastori, which took the form of the audience singing (singing, not chanting) "oootra, oootra."  "¿Bueno, que quereis eschuchar?" she asked.  Whereupon there were yells of various favorites from various corners of the auditorium, and she eventually settled on her signature number "Caí."  I think I deserve some points for listening closely enough to the lyrics to pick up the tell-tale word gaditana, and thus figuring out that "Caí" is the phonetic spelling of the local pronunciation of Cádiz.  Since I know I have faithful blog readers who are fans of all things gaditano, I include a link to the official music video of Caí, to give a sense of the flavor of the evening.  Except you have to imagine it as a fairly intimate live performance, not a super-produced music video.

While all of this was hard to top, I have to admit that the closing performance by El Farruquito, who is more a dancer than a singer, was breathtaking.  Like many tap dancers, he is essentially an entire-body percussion instrument, but I realized watching that there are few men I have seen live whom I would put alongside Fred Astaire and Bill Robinson in terms of sheer speed and purity of sound, combined with a balón that is the more amazing since most of the time he is so grounded.  El Farruquito danced wearing a regular dark suit (no tie, and a somewhat colorful shirt being the only concessions to stage wear) and truly it was good costuming, because it did nothing to distract from his amazingly compelling dancing.  Really, wow.  Just wow.

After his performance a (slightly breathless) El Farruquito offered his tribute to Pepe El Habichuelo with the words "ese gitano ha hecho mucho para el flamenco, y para nosotros."  I was struck by the way he used "ese gitano" since it reminded me somewhat of Larry Wilmore's famously controversial affectionate phrase to Barack Obama.  "Gitano" is almost as loaded a word in Spanish as Wilmore's was in English, and this is the first time I have heard it used as a term of pure affection en familia, as it were.

After that the entire cast (some twenty people or so) came on stage, along with El Habichuelo himself, and while a few sat at guitars or drums the others clustered around microphones doing palmas, and left one microphone open, which they pushed people toward as soloists, to improvise while everyone else acted as backup percussion.  Then after a little while people started getting pushed out onto the empty space in front of the musicians that served as a dance floor to dance, and everyone (including some of El Habichuelo's contemporaries, who are a bit older, have some nice round little paunches) did at least a few steps.  The highlight was when an at least late middle aged lady (who by deduction is El Habichuelo's wife) who avoided appearing rounded by having an enormous bosom was helped onto the stage, and headed back to where the musicians were for a moment to kick off her sling back spike heels and then back downstage to dance, which she proceeded to do in a loose white blouse and pencil skirt, happily stamping away in her bare feet.  Her stamps were totally inaudible over the microphones picking up the drums and guitars and singers, but she was having fun, and she had style.  El Habichuelo came out to join her and the two of them danced briefly, and it was beautiful.

The whole show ended with the audience clapping in a six beat rhythm and yelling olé, and then we emerged and discovered that the whole thing had lasted three hours, even though it had seemed like far less time.

And so I caught the metro home and stayed up too late writing this.  But honestly, I can't think of a better way to spend Spain's fiesta nacional.  Why on earth would you mess around with fighter planes and loud and obnoxious military parades which are expensive and dangerous (I saw on the news after lunch that one pilot managed to crash his plane and kill himself on the way back from a parade) when you have flamenco?  All national stereotypes are crude and exaggerated of course.  But if you have to have a national stereotype, what could be better than the ability to fill a thousand seat venue with modern and sophisticated people who unironically shout olé! and know enough to clap out a bulería rhythm?  As national stereotypes go, that's a pretty awesome one to have.