In The Disappearing Act, flamenco culture stands alongside other, very varied cultures. How did you weave the dramaturgy of this show?
I was born in England, in London, but I now live in Seville: I’ve been living in Spain for fifteen years. In 2014, I co-founded a company with two other English dancers based in Spain. It was essential for us to work with Andalusian artists in order to present in England a flamenco that would not be a cliché. Flamenco doesn’t have much presence in England, except during the Sadler Wells Flamenco Festival in London. I first learned flamenco in the North, in Barcelona and Madrid, during summer master classes. When I moved to the South, I met people who were researching the presence of Afro-descendants in southern Spain between the 15th and 19th centuries. That brought back to the surface a purely physical sensation I’d experienced upon my arrival and which I am trying to embody in The Disappearing Act.
What is that sensation?
I could feel traces of an Afro-descendant presence and of a culture with varied ancestries: particularly on the banks of the Guadalquivir River, where flamenco was born in the 19th century through a mix of Gypsy, Andalusian, North African, and Jewish culture. Recently, archives testifying to an Afro-descendent presence in the region have been found. Around that time, I would cross the Guadalquivir River via the San Telmo bridge every day to go to my flamenco class. Every time, I had the strange sensation of being part of the history of that bridge. One day, I understood that it had welcomed ships bringing spices from Asia, goods from the Americas, but also women and men from the western coast of Africa. I sometimes have the feeling that my encounter with flamenco is connected to this experience of incarnation first and foremost through the body, which enters into a dialogue with a buried past. It’s the question of invisibility and forgetting that The Disappearing Act. tries to address.
Beyond flamenco, The Disappearing Act. focuses on the perception of Afro-descendant bodies and on their constant erasure…
We play with that idea to subvert it: like an attempt to exist by disappearing. I understood relatively early that I had to place myself physically in those locations to explore their invisible traces. I didn’t lock myself up in a studio to create a choreography. On the contrary, I danced on the bridge, I let my body explore those historical places to listen to their stories. We shot a total of six films, one of which on the San Telmo bridge in Seville. We went to Ghana, where my family is from, to shoot the two keeps where enslaved people were imprisoned before being sent across the Atlantic Ocean, but also to the Iberian Peninsula. Two films were shot in Portugal and a final one in the forest, in order to explore the motifs of camouflage. Everywhere we went, I tried to summon the invisible, that which resists despite disappearances and, from there, I was able to create a choreographic grammar in constant dialogue with flamenco.
You call on Andalusian artists from the world of flamenco, but also British and French artists…
Remi Graves is present on stage with me. They are a London-based poet. Their percussive words accompany the journey: they evoke the keeps of Ghana, in our English language. Rosa de Algeciras sings a romantic text with her deep voice over flamenco music, which is always full of stories. I perform in French, as a reference to circus artist Miss Lala. Three languages thus cohabit in this work: three colonial languages. The show brings together several continents: Africa with my Ghanaian heritage, several European countries, but also America, because I am partly Jamaican. I also explore the underlying reasons why I dance, and I don’t really know if what I’m doing can be called “dancing” in the choreographic meaning of the word. Flamenco is primarily about the mastery of energy and rhythm. It’s a dance that belongs to a musical space, as much guided by the rhythm of the steps as by the guitar and the voice. I refuse to use words like “fusion” to talk about my work. I’m not trying to juxtapose cultures, but rather to inject the spirit of flamenco into a very personal show.
You mentioned Miss Lala. How did you become interested in that artist?
At the same time as I’m exploring rather abstract notions—such as the idea of embodying the invisible—characters start to emerge, like Miss Lala. Real name Anna Olga Brown, this 19th-century circus artist was painted by Degas in a painting entitled Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. It’s a painting I’ve always found fascinating. I think it perfectly symbolises the issue of erasure. On the canvas, you can see her muscular body and perceive her incredible strength and agility, but you cannot make out her facial features. What you see in this painting is mainly the body of a Black woman suspended by her mouth, which is a borderline miracle but reduces her to a sideshow attraction. This work by Degas is almost an archival document, because Black bodies weren’t typically represented at that time. I decided to bring Miss Lala back to life in order to play with the invisible, to experience the invisibilised body. The entire show is an experiment, or an exploration.
You’re also experimenting with flamenco music, working with Andalusian musician Raúl Cantizano...
He is one of the pioneers of the experimental renewal of flamenco music. He composes and plays flamenco guitar—which he calls “guitarra preparada,” because he has added strings to rework the sounds it produces. We worked with him, and with Remi Graves, on the percussive rhythm of the music, because it is a fundamental step in almost all forms of musical expression of African origins. The soundscape of the show is at once unique and very simple. We aimed to create states, journeys through the body and the space: sometimes we are in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, sometimes we are journeying through the world of tanguillos, then we enter a Canyon…
The Disappearing Act. would be the first act of a larger dramaturgy, of an ensemble of shows.
This is the first time I have trusted myself to try to articulate and build something on my own. I understood that what I am interested in is the way the body can engage in conversation with broader issues. I am aware that as an Afro-descendant person—and it is also true about flamenco—the desire to move comes from something beyond aesthetic and choreographic research. There is today a better representation of artists of African descent, which is a positive development, but we need to open up possibilities even more, in Europe in general, and in Spain in particular. In recent years, western societies have begun to address the problematic power dynamics which have existed because of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. We’re starting to confront these issues and to try to figure out how to handle all that, without looking away. My mother left Ghana when she was two, she doesn’t speak her mother tongue, even though she can understand it because her parents spoke it. That’s why I have not had the honour of connecting with that culture. Firstly, because it was my grandparents who emigrated, and above all because they belonged to a generation who believed their culture had no value, that they had to erase it. I am always in this space of desire, the desire of understanding the points of connection with my maternal culture. It’s a quest that can last a lifetime. I don’t know how much time the next show will need to come about, and I want to embrace that, this long process, to find the sincerest anchor possible.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant (February 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach