Dancer Cihtli Ocampo is one of the American ringers amid the authentic Sevillians in Arte y Pureza. But she’s no less devoted to the roots of flamenco

Late nights and long hauls are a fact of life when you’re on the road, and tough travelling conditions aren’t limited to rock bands and their roadies. That’s the report from the Arte y Pureza tour bus, anyway: when we reach the flamenco troupe’s guitarist and manager Ethan Margolis, he’s suffering from the effects of having been up until 5 in the morning, having driven to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following an engagement in Cleveland, Ohio. Amiably enough, he begs off our originally scheduled interview time: his immediate priority, he explains, is making sure he gets his charges fed. An hour later he calls back, and from the hum of Spanish conversation in the background it seems that mission has been successfully accomplished.

If the strain of shepherding a gaggle of unilingual Sevillanos through the American rust belt is getting to him, it’s not apparent over the phone. In fact, when it comes to Arte y Pureza’s main attraction, singer Inés Bacán, Margolis still sounds every bit as starstruck as he was when he first discovered flamenco—thanks to guitar innovator Paco de Lucía—as an impressionable 18-year-old.

“She’s the living essence of roots-Gypsy singing at its best,” Margolis says of Bacán, who’ll make her Vancouver debut with Arte y Pureza at North Vancouver’s Centennial Theatre tonight (October 8). “When she walks on-stage, she doesn’t even have to open her mouth. It’s immediately obvious. She’s been living in one of the most important flamenco-singing families in Spain all her life; all her family are artists, everybody. All of them have grown up in the roots style, and have also gone through a school where if you don’t study very, very, very hard to do the songs exactly how they need to be done, then you don’t perform them at all.”

As impressed as Margolis is with the great diva, he sounds equally happy to have her brother Juan along for the ride, perhaps because he’s managed to extract a few flamenco-guitar pointers from the less well known of the Bacán siblings. “He never performs on-stage,” Margolis stresses. “He sings at home, and at weddings and that kind of thing, but he’s not a touring artist. Still, he brings the same thing that she does to the table.”

And that thing, he explains, is flamenco at its purest, as performed by artists who carry its heritage in their Roma blood. Arte y Pureza might include a couple of American ringers in the form of Margolis and his dancer wife, Cihtli Ocampo, but they’re just as committed to the roots of flamenco as any fan-wielding cantaora. As the guitarist explains, he’s been living the flamenco life since moving to Seville a decade ago, and his California-honed Spanish has been just as much a part of his acceptance as his undeniably fleet fingers.

“There’s a lot of things you can access very easily, as either a student of flamenco or a tourist or whatever,” he says. “But it’s extremely difficult to go past that level, to get into an equal relationship with people and more meaningful conversations—and the only way to do that is to be there a lot, and to speak the language really well. Because it’s not about the music; it’s about the people.”