They killed him, yet Lorca persists in the flamenco carried under the flame, with every tear and every cry. The Iberian Peninsula remains a living site, now everywhere in sight.
This Monday night, among scholars and writers, with foreigners from around the world and Spanish citizens alike, Lorca’s enchantment rose as the lights of the world. Cadiz hosted a show that seemed imagined by the artist himself. All the lights appeared sky-blue and purple, filling that vast space with the blue of the last city in Europe. Every detail echoed the dreams of the Lorca circle, where moments of happiness and sorrow were reflected in her face.
Spanish time with all its accents and nuances
The musicians, the singers, the guitars, the ankles and throats, and the dancers’ reflections in the air answered a rare, secret bliss that felt as earthy blue, and the audience joined in the enchantment. A storm of broken, winding words, flamenco’s renunciation of love, opened a territory in rupture.
Again the sigh becomes an air that governs the poet more than anyone else. Houses guarded by jealousy or the absence of it, by love. Since artists began with themselves, all degrees of creation unfurl endlessly. It is as if one need not know every word to feel what is being sung, as if urgent rain were falling.
For lamentation resembles a shattered cloud placed there by the poet, and literature becomes an enigmatic letter. The surreal sun and the guitars blend with the brilliance of the fans, while wrists talk and voices sing. The woman who takes flight never falls, as if she had stepped from a game of love.
In that moment of airborne happiness, Lorca seems present, moving up and down to reveal that nothing moving in this seaside world is foreign to the poet who was killed yet not buried—the earth’s most beautiful inspiration, mingling life and blood.
The chairs appear still, yet behind the dance a living rhythm moves like skeletons in the dark. Andalusian crossovers cast a grammar upon the scene, lighting the jondo mood of the arts. It feels like stepping into Cádiz’s sunset, a nightingale seeking its wounds.
It is the full poetry of kante drawn by Lorca.
Chemistry rushing toward the cry of poetry: “And though I am far from you, I am always with you, and I cannot live without you.” Sometimes the pains are audible, wounds weighing like lead, reconciliations that end in a peaceful, shared farewell.
Moon, month, moon. The bulería breathes with both sorrow and joy. The idea of saying or writing the words matters less than the imperative of quiet, air, and sun. From time to time life can feel like a dream.
Whatever was spoken in this concert of silence, of anger, of blue and purple and sea and sky, Cádiz stood as a broken flower, a forest of beautiful lines, a sun given by heaven that only the one who dances can dry with joy.
Yet pain remains, of course there is pain. Ah. Pain as Lorca would draw it.
Este texto está inspirado por el espectáculo flamenco (Tiempo de luz) celebrado anoche en el Teatro Manuel de Falla de Cádiz y organizado por el Instituto Cervantes. El baile de Ana Morales, las guitarras de Miguel Ángel Cortés y José Quevedo Bolita y la percusión de Pakito González completan este programa encabezado por tres referentes: Carmen Linares, Marina Heredia y Arcángel.