Rafaela y "Nacida Sombra"
For this year’s Helsinki Flamenco Festival we got lucky again. Rafaela Carrasco came to rock that thing and stayed here for almost a week.
Prior to this experience, I haven’t had any contact with her and to be honest, I wasn’t very aware of her work. My dear friend Ramón Maronier pretty much instructed me to pay attention to her so I went ahead and did some research of my own, reserved my place at the intensive course she was going to give and purchased a couple of tickets for the show at the Savoy theater in downtown Helsinki.
It might be my own moment and my own evolution, but what an incredible joy it is to be able to take part of a group where the leader has just EVERYTHING under control. She has that confidence and she transmits it to the group. At the same time I, very quickly, realized that I was in the presence of someone that knows what hard work means and that has embraced that way of life as her own professional way of doing things. That reflected as well in the intensity and in the fluency of the class.
So weekend came and so we went to the theater to see them perform. As the lights went off and the whole idea started unveiling, I stood my ground not too generous but not too reserved either in my mind. At some point, I confess, I caught myself having questions of whether or not I was really enjoying the show, but soon after that it hit me and I realized I wasn’t there to be superficially impressed, that there were not going to be intense faces or sweat flying all around, no one was going to look directly into a light pretending to be ripping apart some part of the costume, no, this was something else, both deeper and higher. And so I entered into a different zone with the show. I opened my ears trying to take in all the value that the phrasing had, admiring the craft and the outstanding attention to detail put into every move of her and into those of the incredible dancers who came, enjoying the diversity of palos and the richness in the harmony of Cano’s guitar and the noticeable complicity that runs around them. And good cante that can make me feel both safe and lost in the same time. I appreciated a lot a figure that doesn’t need to be held at all moments as the protagonist or not even the leader, she’s (Rafaela) not afraid of being part of something “smaller” at some moments and she can definitely can and took the lead when she felt like. As I’m sitting right now in college writing this, I can remember the joy of watching her dancing some cantiñas. Just how good it felt.
"La dama de hielo", "The ice lady" some call her, I guess is because the transparency, sharpness, honesty and fragility.
Surgical precision, craft that talks about true passion and truth, poetry to my ears.
10/10
“Sin claridad, no hay voz de sabiduría”.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Follow Rafaela at:
http://rafaelacarrasco.com/
