Flamenco finds Asian flair at Mozaico Flamenco’s Café de Chinitas

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      Erhus and Spanish guitars; fans and castanets; brocade cheongsams and ruffled skirts. Mozaico Flamenco’s Café de Chinitas brings together East and West in a fusion you could only find in Vancouver.

      The new, full-length production puts flamenco musicians on the same stage with the ancient Chinese instruments of the Orchid Ensemble, along with dancers and a musical director all the way from Madrid.

      “It’s cross-pollination, and why not?” says artistic director Oscar Nieto over the phone from his Hastings Street studio. “That’s why I called the company Mozaico: so that you could always mix other things. Flamenco doesn’t belong just to the Spanish and the Gypsies, but it belongs to the world now.”

      The piece is named for a famous flamenco tablao that became a hub for the art form in mid-1800s Malaga. Legend has it that the hangout got its name—Chinitas means “Chinese women”—from all the Asian women who came there (most, it’s believed, from the Philippines, where Spain still held colonial rule). Later, in the 1930s, famed Spanish poet Federico García Lorca revived the music of the café in a song series named for it, penning his own lyrics. The multi-ethnic band here, under the direction of Spain’s Gaspar Rodriguez, will reinterpret that music for the dancers. Nieto says Rodriguez has used Skype and YouTube to coordinate with dancers and the Orchid Ensemble—proving that Mozaico’s international project might never have come to fruition without the Internet.

      Nieto says fellow Mozaico instructor and star flamenco dancer Kasandra “La China” Lea was drawn to create the cultural hybrid because of her own Chinese heritage. Mozaico staged its first, short experiment with Café de Chinitas in a mixed program in 2006, but wasn’t able to develop it into a full work until now; Lea had children, and Nieto went through a gruelling battle with cancer between 2008 and 2010.

      It’s also taken the troupe a while to gather the necessary talent for the ambitious production. A key was securing the two male leads, who play jealous matador brothers battling for the attentions of Lea’s star dancer. In earlier days, Nieto himself might have performed one of the parts, but with a dearth of male flamenco dancers here in Canada, he looked to the hotbed of Spain, where the art form has been enjoying a resurgence. Ricardo Lopez and Emilio Ochando, who dance for leading Spanish companies like Nuevo Ballet Españo and Compañia Rafaela Carrasco, will take the fiery, bravado-pumped roles.

      “We needed to raise the bar of our company so it was as up-to-date as it could be,” Nieto explains. “Flamenco has evolved a lot in the last 10 to 15 years, and these dancers are cutting-edge. And for them to come to Canada is a good thing: things are tough in Spain. Also, where you do bring somebody from Spain, there’s a certain authority, because they’re in that [flamenco] milieu all the time, and they know what’s new.

      “On a side note,” adds Nieto, who has been pummelling the floor as a flamenco bailaor for about four decades, “I was having to make peace with the fact that I’m an older dancer and for the company to survive we have to bring in fresh blood.”

      Nieto admits he was unsure about how the rhythms of Spain would meld with the haunting music of Asia in a live performance, but says they have meshed perfectly. The zitherlike zheng echoes the cries of the cantaors, and the Orchid Ensemble’s percussion finds its beat in the palmas and castanets. It may not be exactly what you would have seen at the Café de Chinitas in the 1800s, but, like Nieto says, flamenco has come a long way since then.

      Café de Chinitas is at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre on Friday and Saturday (May 3 and 4).

      Comments

      2 Comments

      Brenda Moen

      May 2, 2013 at 12:56pm

      Not only the great capability of putting all feet sounding at the same time as a mosaic , keeping the characteristics of the authentic Flamenco from " Jerez de la frontera" in Spain , but glueing all of them with love.
      It is such a titanic work to introduce in to the Canadian culture the complicate twelve beats that accompanies this dance and more than that , to incorporate other cultures in it without loosing the essence of the incandescent but aggressively firm dance of this dance of the" tablao español "

      Alfredo

      May 2, 2013 at 2:02pm

      Oscar and Kasandra with their company Mozaico put Vancouver on the world map of refreshed, globalized Flamenco. Ole' to their effort and to what promises to be super sophisticated and emotionally compelling show. Looking forward!!!