Roberto Jimenez | Valladolid (EFE).- The styles in flamenco are like the genres in literature, a form of expression that in the case of the bailaora María Moreno (Cádiz, 1986) drinks from the great masters but without being pigeonholed: a springboard for new experiences that faces without limits from new codes, is Flamenco 2.0.
“But I’m a bailaora, huh?”, she qualifies quickly in an interview with EFE before participating in Valladolid in one of the shows of the International Festival of Theater and Street Arts (TAC), in her case inside an old monastery Benedictine (14th century) converted into a museum of contemporary art: tradition and avant-garde, like its art.
“What I like the most is to let myself go completely, to do things that I have never done before, that come from the heart and not from the studio. There I feel totally free and a María comes out who is not just a bailaora”, explains this woman from Cádiz who is a regular at the Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla and of maximum projection.
no strings attached flamenco
Now he levitates through the cloisters of the old monastery of San Benito with his show “Verso libre”, a blank page, without a script, a way of experimenting that emerges from a restless and versatile personality: “I want to discover things and live experiences”, he has underlined without spoiling the trail of sacred monsters such as Vicente Escudero, whom he cites as one of the references of baile.
She blows the whistles and the people who attend “Verso libre” follow her as if she were the Pied Piper: she stops, talks, explains what she is doing, goes out into the patios, walks through the galleries and dances to the tunes of Eduardo Trassierra while the Benedictine walls project an image of Vicente Escudero, to whom he dedicates a soleá.
“I like to thank the great teachers who have broken barriers and allowed my generation to be freer. I am a bailaora but not from seventy years ago. I have the tools that I want to use but what I do is not contemporary flamenco either ”, she has analyzed.
free flamingo
The soleá is where María Moreno is most at home, one of the styles that tolerates greater expressiveness in movements, turns, stomping and lunges: she writes with her body who, at the age of 8, enrolled in the Professional Dance Conservatory of her Cádiz Natal and that at 16 he already joined the company of Eva Yerbabuena.
Far from settling in a company of reference and international projection, he opted for “discovering new things and experiences, taking advantage of experiences and opening other doors… I have brought all this to my dance”, he added a veiled reference to the title of the book ( “I dance”) where he explains his theory with photos of Susana Girón, as Vicente Escudero himself did decades ago.
Without fear
“I’m a bailaora who isn’t afraid to show her personality, that’s why sometimes I move away from that traditional image: I’m a bit of a chameleon”, she sums up with the mischief hinted at by a green-eyed smile.
As the view spreads out, María Moreno gazes at a flamenco “who has become very professional” but finds that the institutional treatment given to him is not up to the standards of “one of the most international cultures we have, and it is time to have into account,” he warns.
But not everything is cante and joy, heartbreak and lamentation, but behind it there is “an enormous work” that people often don’t perceive because they think that flamenco “is something natural”.
“For flamenco you have to have a gift, yes, but you have to work on it. It is beautiful but very complicated, a task that is a bit hidden. People are not fully aware of everything that is behind it… just having the gift is not worth it ”, she stressed. EFE
