Flamenco Fire - Viva Sevilla - QPAC
SPECIAL TICKET OFFER!
Adult tickets at Concession prices for evening performances on Tuesday 2nd, Wednesday 3rd & Thursday 4th - save up to $20 per ticket!
Flamenco Fire returns with Viva Sevilla – The Golden Age of Flamenco! Directed by composer / guitarist Andrew Veivers and featuring dancer Francesca 'La Chica' Grima, singer Olayo Jimenez and percussionist Andrej Vujicic - direct from Spain - performing alongside Australia’s finest flamenco artists - dancer Simone Pope, singer Clara Domingo, guitarist Kieren Ray and violinist Shenton Gregory. Viva Sevilla is a beautifully crafted show that reveals the flamenco art form in all of its guises. From contemporary festive dances to heart wrenching traditional songs, to fiery guitar ensemble pieces, Flamenco Fire will transport you to España......¡Olé!
Viva Sevilla is the third instalment of a historically based flamenco trilogy that explores the cultural, geopolitical, and religious influences that, combined over a period of almost two thousand years, produce the various elements of the art form of flamenco.
The years known as the Golden Age of Flamenco, approx. 1850 - 1920, saw all of the elements that we now distinguish as flamenco come together in Sevilla and flourish. Sevilla had been the unofficial capital of Andalucia, in Southern Spain, for many hundreds of years and by the nineteenth century it had already been a relatively large and extremely cosmopolitan city for centuries. Flamenco, on the other hand, had been a private expression amongst farmers, peasants, miners etc. and those close to them. From the 1850's to the 1920's flamenco was introduced to the wider public for the first time in the environment of The Cafe Cantantes. Performers of flamenco became ‘artists’. Performing in cafe's, tablaos and eventually theatres and concert halls initially throughout Spain and then the rest of the world, these artists continued the flamenco tradition of absorbing the influences they encountered.
As with the other major periods of development in the flamenco story, explored in the previous two Flamenco Fire shows in this trilogy (Al-Andaluz and Gypsy Pathways), this Golden Age didn't blossom unaided. A fertile new ground of changing attitudes to political and religious authority, unprecedented economic, industrial, and population growth as well as challenges to long held social structures, empowered practitioners of an art form, who had been marginalised and persecuted for two millennia, to consolidate centuries of folk lore, influenced from cultures and stories from around the world, into what would quickly, but unexpectedly, become a Spanish national treasure.
Many challenges that exist in Australian society today were present in 19th century Spain. The concepts of nationhood, sovereign territory, the balancing of political and religious powers, cultural tolerance, the influences and difficulties in balancing the growth and decline of industries, the impact of migration on farming, mining and urban communities. Using the aesthetic of traditional flamenco combined with contemporary dance choreography, original composition and supporting visual and staging design, Viva Sevilla examines these cultural challenges within the Spanish historical cultural context and connects them to the contemporary Australian experience.