Ole!

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

After seeing Carmen, the 1983 flamenco dance film by Carlos Saura and Antonio Gades, I started taking flamenco classes just to satisfy my curiosity:  how does the movement feel? From the first, flamenco seemed to suit my body and way of moving, but there was something else, something I only understood when I saw it in dance class. 

Every woman there, no matter her age, size, shape, or ability, was transformed with even the simplest flamenco dance movement; each woman at once moved as if she felt herself to be beautiful. It was something to see, looking down along the rows of women, all facing the mirror, and each suddenly bright with the sense of her own beauty. I’d never seen it happen in any other dance class, nor any other gathering of women.

This is one of the most attractive aspects of flamenco for me -- that it celebrates a real woman’s body. Not the flat coat-hangers of American ballet, women who dance flamenco, with as much strength and endurance as ballerinas, are beautifully and roundly shaped. Their hips and breasts don’t slow their dancing, or get in the way of the movement, or interrupt the line of the choreography. Flamencas dance intricate steps with precision, passion, and intense womanly beauty. And they are still dancing well past the usual retirement age for dancers.

In 1985, I attended a dance performance in New York of Carmen by Antonio Gades and his company. Lead dancer Cristina Hoyos danced Carmen onstage, although she had a different role in the 1983 film. (There is a wonderful scene in the film that you know is based on a real encounter: Cristina confronts Antonio about his choice of Carmen, whom he is asking her to train. He says that the dancer he chose has what he wants; Cristina nods and sighs, saying, “Yes, she is young.”)

Cristina was a brilliant Carmen, nearly on fire. And though she did not dance the title role in the film Carmen, she danced the leads in Blood Wedding and El Amor Brujo, the other two films in that astonishing trilogy. In all of them, her dancing is electrifying, her presence regal, her body strong, slender, and curvy. 

Twelve years later, in 1997, Cristina Hoyos brought her own dance company to New York City. It was clear that she encourages and develops talented young dancers in her company; she still does so, at age 66, featuring them and no longer serving as star dancer.

But in 1997, she was the star. At the dance concert, I was sitting in the sixth row. When Cristina Hoyos came onstage, I was shocked, then relieved, then grateful to see her 50-year-old body. It was a beautiful body, but not a young one, with a thicker waist, visible abdomen, and heavy upper arms, which she neither flaunted nor hid.

I got the feeling she’d worked all her life to become strong enough for this body, that she’d earned it. When she danced, she was better than she’d been twelve years before. She was beyond electric; she ignited the air. Her dancing was profound, a revelation of what it means to be human. It carried the wisdom, the weight, of a mature woman, and it took my breath away.