Flamenco

I’d heard flamenco before.

On recordings. In the background.

To me it sounded like squeaks and tension – not “passion and fire”.

Interesting, but not my frequency.

I had an evening to myself and I decided that a live show plus a good dinner would be the test.

It wasn’t exactly around the corner, so I took a taxi. I still didn’t trust my feet in the new sandals. The place turned out to be a small, intimate restaurant–club. It was already dark outside. I was the only one without a partner, but it didn’t bother me at all. They sat me at a little table right by the stage. Starters arrived, I even tried some wine.

Then the performers came in.

They introduced themselves as a family. Two men, two women. One guitar.

The first chords, the first song. The man sang.

The younger woman started to dance.

Her movements slowly began to hypnotise me.

The music suddenly stopped sounding like “some strange traditional thing” and more like the opening of a portal. It wasn’t about the lyrics – I wouldn’t have understood them anyway. It was about how the voice, the guitar and her body moved as one.

I didn’t hear it. I felt it.

It was as if the energy the dancer carried dropped straight into me, not through my eyes but through vibration. I forgot about the food. For a while I was nothing but rhythm with her.

Then they changed dancers. An older woman slid onto the stage.

I didn’t know a stage could catch fire without real flames. Everything burned.

I knew those emotions, not from dance, not from a show. The floor was shaking and so was I. Tears were running down my cheeks; I didn’t even notice the moment they started.

For that moment, she was the closest person to me in the world.

The same feelings, the same fury and tenderness, the same voltage, just housed in another body. She was throwing it out; I was absorbing it. Like we were plugged into the same source from opposite ends of a cable.

I was gone.

For me, flamenco wasn’t something you simply like or dislike.

You either felt it. Or you didn’t.

Watching her, I recognised a current I already knew – quiet, stubborn, entirely mine.

Breath of Fire

This drawing belongs with this frame because both begin when the body knows first.