Celebrate and Recalibrate Flamenco Project

On November 16, the International Flamenco Day is commemorated throughout the world. UNESCO declared this dance to be Spanish Intangible Heritage of Humanity on November 16, 2010, and since then, this day has been celebrated in a number of ways. Flamenco singing, guitar playing and dancing are the three main pillars of the artform. Yet, its history has a complex and often debated past. To explore this entangled past, C-DaRE’s artist and researcher Rosa Cisneros with the support of US, Romani technowizard and stepdancer, Russell Brown, and flamenco scholar and dancer MeiraGoldberg, have organised a three-day event on Nov 14th-16th to honour Flamenco.

Over the three days, Roma and non-Roma authors will expand on their latest chapter in Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots The Body Questions, Edited by K. Meira Goldberg and Antoni Pizà. The book is a collection of essays that poses a series of questions revolving around nonsense, cacophony, queerness, race, and the dancing body. The book asks how can flamenco, as a diasporic complex of performance and communities of practice frictionally and critically bound to the complexities of Spanish history, illuminate theories of race and identity in performance?


-Introduce Flamenco History and current debates to broader audience
-Roma History Awareness
-Explore how can we posit, and argue for, genealogical relationships within and between genres across the vast expanses of the African—and Roma—diaspora? Neither are the essays presented here limited to flamenco, nor, consequently, are the responses to these questions reduced to this topic. What all the contributions here do share is the wish to come together, across disciplines and subject areas, within the academy and without, in the whirling, raucous, and messy spaces where the body is free—to celebrate its questioning, as well as the depths of the wisdom and knowledge it holds and sometimes reveals.

The project allows for the artists and researchers to dialogue and to explore how practice can inform research and vice-versa. Flamenco has a contested past and is always evolving. The debates centered on historical realities can be limiting and therefore, Celebrate and Recalibrate Flamenco opens up online dialogical spaces for the general public, artists, academics and anyone with an interest in Flamenco to come together, learn, share, question, react and gather different perspectives on current research streams in the field of flamenco performance.

-Introduce Flamenco History and current debates to broader audience
-Roma History Awareness
-Explore how can we posit, and argue for, genealogical relationships within and between genres across the vast expanses of the African—and Roma—diaspora? Neither are the essays presented here limited to flamenco, nor, consequently, are the responses to these questions reduced to this topic. What all the contributions here do share is the wish to come together, across disciplines and subject areas, within the academy and without, in the whirling, raucous, and messy spaces where the body is free—to celebrate its questioning, as well as the depths of the wisdom and knowledge it holds and sometimes reveals.

The project allows for the artists and researchers to dialogue and to explore how practice can inform research and vice-versa. Flamenco has a contested past and is always evolving. The debates centered on historical realities can be limiting and therefore, Celebrate and Recalibrate Flamenco opens up online dialogical spaces for the general public, artists, academics and anyone with an interest in Flamenco to come together, learn, share, question, re act and gather di fferent perspectives on current research streams in the field of flamenco performance.