All-Female Flamenco Show Celebrates Women, Defies Machismo

An all-female flamenco performance, created by uptown dancer Xianix Barrera, challenges traditions at El Barrio’s Artspace.

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By Christina Kelso

Two women dance, their bodies entwined as hand clapping, finger snapping, song and guitar guide them through a story of discovery, love and loss.

The all-female flamenco production “Mujer (es),” by uptown dancer Xianix Barrera*, shakes up flamenco’s traditionally rigid gender roles.

Opening Thursday for a three-night run at El Barrio’s Artspace Blackbox Theater in East Harlem, “Mujer (es)” highlights five women artists performing in what has been a male-dominated art form. Event Tickets

“There’s always a male singer and there’s always a male guitarist and a male percussionist and a male director,” said Barrera, 34. “I wanted to see what that would look like, what that would sound like, what that would be like to see an all-female flamenco show.”

Originating in southern Spain, flamenco blends guitar (toque), song (cante) and percussive dance (baile). The dance incorporates swift motion and reverberating sounds like handclapping, finger snaps and rhythmic footwork.

Growing up in Washington Heights, the daughter of Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants, Barrera always loved music and dance. As a child, she learned ballet and jazz dance, practiced cheerleading and played in a marching band, before falling headfirst for flamenco 13 years ago. She now performs and teaches flamenco professionally and travels regularly to study and dance in southern Spain. The show marks her fourth at El Barrio’s Artspace.

It’s a production in two parts.

Part One is a love story of two women, told through a dance duet called “Corriente.”

“That means ‘current’ as in our current times,” Barrera said. “It also means electrical current, in terms of that feeling you get first falling in love.”

Barrera developed “Corriente” last year as an artist in residence with Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana, a dance company in midtown.

“I was exploring my identity as a Latin American woman in New York, as a dancer, as a dancer that doesn’t have the typical body of a dancer,” she said. “Also, a new side of myself in terms of my sexual identity, being with a woman for the first time.”

The show debuted last October at City University of New York’s Center for LGBTQ Studies. The upcoming performance, directed by dancer Rosario Toledo from southern Spain, will be its first for a wider flamenco audience.

In the second part of “Mujer (es),” the women perform a traditional flamenco repertoire. The show challenges stereotypes about female performers, such as the belief that they don’t have strong enough hands to master flamenco guitar.

Integral to the show is Antonia Jimenez, 46, one of only a handful of women in the world who performs flamenco guitar professionally.

As a 6-year-old first learning to play in Cadiz, Spain, she had never seen a female flamenco guitarist. She had no women to mentor or inspire her as she studied.

“It was hard at the beginning to break this system,” she said, recalling the discrimination she experienced early in her career.

Marta Wieczorek, who researches the anthropology of dance at Zayed University in Dubai, said in an email that while there are many historic accounts of female flamenco guitarists, the emerging popularity of theatrical performances for tourists in the 20th Century tightened gender expectations.

Theater audiences preferred the “romantic, foreign stereotypes” of male singers and guitar players, domains perceived as intellectual, and female dancers who were physical and emotional.

“In a patriarchal Spanish context, women were denied the public role of guitarists who should exhibit a great degree of craftsmanship and masterful control over the instrument,” she said.

She added, however, that female singers and guitar players and male dancers are common in private, daily flamenco practice.

“Mujer (es)” isn’t the first dance show to sidestep gender expectations. Still, such productions are not common, nor are storylines centered on same-sex relationships.

Jimenez sees tradition as both vital and dangerous to flamenco’s future.

“In the time we are living, we need to break these borders,” Jimenez said. “They are for nothing.”

*CORRECTION: The story originally misspelled Ms. Barrera’s last name. The Uptowner regrets the error.

(Photo by by Carlos David)

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