Viajera
July 2006
TRAVELLER: I have a new flatmate called Manuela. We are at the beginning of a heat wave, staring at the air conditioning thermostat of our attic flat, broken (again). It was our only weapon against this oven, formerly known as Seville. Sweat is running down my back, beads of it gathering at her temples. The other day, I had left the flat with a big umbrella to keep the sun off. Well, the looks I got, and the comments. Do anything a little different in this town and you hear all about. I just wanted to yell "Yeah, I’m foreign, GET OVER IT"
Manuela is better known by her very elderly mother as Kyoko. She is a Flamenco singer from Japan, here with us for a month on her yearly sabbatical in the heartland. She began to sing at three and always dreamed of making a career out of it. However, her father’s poor health prevented her from entering into the conservatorium to study opera, so she went on to study engineering instead. Then, at the age of thirty three, she encountered Flamenco and fell in love. It’s hard to imagine the diminutive shapes of Japanese women defiantly grinding their feet into the floor, flicking out duende with the turn of the head, but it is amazing how popular Flamenco is in Japan. Most schools here are full of Japanese students, and by golly they're good.
Anyway, Manuela isn't exactly diminutive. I would say she is about 100 kgs and I can imagine her hand chopping the air with pent up feeling ¡Óle! her eyes squeezed shut, and her voice singing ¡Ay yay yay yaayyy! full throttle. For the last thirteen years, she has made a career of teaching and singing Flamenco in the heart of Tokyo. As is quite common, due to her dedication to her art, Manuela's knowledge of Flamenco far surpasses the average local. There are lots of misconceptions out there even in the heartland. I thought I knew a fair bit, but she has already challenged a lot of widely accepted histories, like the one about the gypsies being the originators of Flamenco.
No one knows the origins of this art form, because no one was thinking of posterity back then. It just happened, like so many things, as a slow mixing of expression and experiences over centuries. The Moors and Jews in the South, Northerners including immigrant workers from Flanders, known as Flamencos (one possible source of the name), Gypsies from the East, and many other sources made their presence felt in the Iberian Peninsular, all flowing and whirling and binding together, like a long platted river. It started simply with the voice, a box and clapping for rhythm, then dance came and finally the guitar.
There are in Flamenco, numerous different styles or palos with different counts, accents and tone. Tangos, Alegrías, Bulerías, and Sevillanas are just some of the thirty odd palos that exist today. They each have their protocols and particularities, famous first protagonists and areas that claim them as their own, all of which is arguable (there is lot of argument in Flamenco). Interestingly "Flamenco" as a name for all of this, was only used late in the 1800s and was concretised as an art form as late as the 1930s, with the Dictator Franco later making great sanitised use of it to manufacture the Spanish identity, to the detriment of other Spanish art forms. This is possibly where our ideas of polka dots and fans and shawls and men in bolero jackets come from. Naturally, there has arisen arguments about what is pure, what is watered down or commercial or affected by outside influences and who does or does not have the justification to practice and be considered on the inside of Flamenco.
One of the most beautiful Pohutukawa I've ever seen is in Te Araroa on the East Cape. It takes my breath away. Meanwhile, one of the most beautiful Pohutukawa trees the people of Galicia, Spain have ever seen is in La Coruña. So proud of it are they (it is about 200 years old) it has been named a symbol of their city. Pohutukawa, Ti Kouka (Cabbage tree) and Harakeke (Flax) grow very well on the Galician coast. Now how did they get there? One theory is that the feverishly popular pass time of collecting exotic things in the 18 th and 19 th centuries meant that ultimately, specimens or seeds made their way from New Zealand to Spain.
In Japan Manuela feels like an outsider, and in Flamenco, she found a part of herself she could not otherwise have defined. However, being Japanese, and not Spanish or Gypsy, she has trouble being accepted in the Flamenco scene, especially here in the South. Caught between two worlds, she goes where she can participate without being seen as an outsider. Years ago, walking one Christmas holiday near that Pohutukawa in Te Araroa, I heard the familiar chords of Flamenco guitar. It was coming from a guy sitting on the front steps of the local diary, up to see the family for the holidays. Seeds of Flamenco had caught hold in fertile ground right back here at home, where they seemed to me, to fit right in.
Duende: a term often used in Spain to describe flamenco singers or dancers who transmit an untranslatable quality that is a mixture of strength, rapture and rawness, depth and impact .
And Galicians are well known as world travellers, their port a hub if New World travel from the 16 th century on.
The Spanish (or Paniora to the locals) influence first reached the East Cape in the form of Jóse Manuel, who arrived in New Zealand from La Mancha (central Spain) in the 19th century and got to work producing a lot of children who’s descendants form te whaanau Jóse Manuel of the East Cape today.
