Romance Cartographies: Flamenco Articulations of Queer Spaces in Urban Andalusia

Ian Biddle

Newcastle University, UK
Published March 2019

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A first intermedio

... en medio de un ambiente delicioso,

de mar, fonógrafos y de cuadros cubistas,

te saludo y te abrazo.[1]

Silence. Then, slowly, distant birdsong becomes audible. Long panning shot: blue sky cut by two tall cypresses. The camera pans down into a small square in a cemetery in Barcelona. The square is flanked by the traditional stacked tombs, buried into deep walls, festooned with flowers, photographs, trinkets and other mementos of dead loved ones. As the camera pans down, the floor of the small square is revealed, a dusty sandy surface floor over paved bricks, parched by the hot Spanish sun. A woman appears from the far right-hand corner, in traditional Andalusian dress, fluttering a fan in the heat with her right hand. She makes her way uncertainly into the square, left hand on hip, and sways her hips slowly. She saunters over to the wall on the left of the shot, slowly checking some tombs as she passes, walking towards the camera. As the camera closes in on her, we see she is wearing a mantilla or black lace head scarf over a peineta or ornamental comb: traditional Andalusian dress. Yellow flowers emerge from under the mantilla. Slowly, respectfully, she surveys more tombs, as if looking for someone. She continues to waft the fan swiftly, nervously, in a manner close to ritual. She wears the demeanour of a woman de luto riguroso, in deep mourning.

1

Her facial expression changes and she raises her left hand, as she finds someone she knows, and nods, smiles and whispers something inaudible. Then another name catches her attention. She makes the sign of the cross respectfully, again intoning something, almost like an automaton, gently and respectfully closing her eyes. Suddenly she closes the fan and clutches it in both hands, raises her head upwards and begins to sing a tentative quejío (the opening 'ay') of a slow and declamatory version, in the style of a palo seco (unaccompanied song from the flamenco cante jondo [deep song] repertoire), of the 'Zorongo gitano' (gypsy zorongo) collected by Federico García Lorca in his Collección de canciones populares españoles.[2] She begins, in the manner of a canción aflamencada or song in the style of flamenco, with the words to the chorus:

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La luna es un pozo chico,

las flores no valen nada,

lo que valen son tus brazos

cuando de noche me abrazan.

[the moon is a small well

flowers do not matter

what matters are your arms

when at night they hold me]

She goes on to sing words, quite different from those collected by Lorca:

García Lorca, gitano

Moreno de verde luna

¿Donde está tu cuerpo santo?

Que no tuvo ni sepultura.

[García Lorca, gitano

Dark-skinned of a green moon

Where is your holy body?

You did not even have a tomb]

This striking and sudden invocation of Lorca, asserting a parallel between the cemetery and the (missing) body of Lorca (he was famously murdered by nationalist militia on the road between Víznar and Alfacar near Granada in 1936 and his body was never found), also makes a claim to the ongoing continuity of queer Lorca and flamenco, to the notion that flamenco as a set of cultural practices connects with ways of seeing the world that are far from 'traditional', far from conformist. Here, flamenco stalks the present like an accusation, like the broken voice of a silenced but vengeful other. The song is cross-dressed too, from cante chico or light song of Lorca's 'Zorongo' to the declamatory style of the cante jondo, which Lorca, together with Manuel de Fall and others, was himself instrumental in 'reclaiming' in the 1922 Concurso de cante jondo [Cante jondo Competition).[3] As she continues to sing, the woman clutches at her dress, at one point deliberately pulling out the sides of the dress to take up a stance like that of the famous enfantas in Velázquez's Las meninas, as if deliberately drawing attention to the critical historicity of the scene. And then, 'Where', she shouts, 'are the people who at night come to adore you? Where are the flirtatious words, now lost on the streets? I bring you flowers and adore you only on dark Andalusian nights.' And with that, she gently intones the final quejío and sinks to her knees, adopting the gesture of a woman in prayer.

This famous scene from Ventura Pons's ground-breaking documentary Ocaña: retrato intermittent (Spain, 1978), shows José Pérez Ocaña, male painter and performance artist, dressed as a beata, a pious woman attached to the rituals of the catholic church. The mise-en-scène uses the walls of tombs as both a visual and auditory boundary, and delivers an intimacy that jars with the ferocity of the voice. That disturbing juxtaposition of the declamatory voice in song and the closed-off space of the cemetery (the intense identification with Andalusian tradition and its destabilisation through transvestism), opens out (indeed, I would argue, demands) an exploration of the queer spaces of flamenco, as intensely contested sites of transformation, places where atavistic attachments to tradition are enacted, disturbed and critiqued.

3

Scott Ehrenburg recently described the construction of space in Ocaña as susceptible to a particularly queer logic, as generating espacios queer. With regard to the cemetery scene, Ehrenburg suggests,

4

este interludio caracteriza un drag temporal, una queerificación de tiempo y de espacio. Situado en un cementerio de Barcelona, Ocaña se remonta a otra época, antes de la dictadura de Franco, a un momento histórico saturado de sangrienta beligerancia política e ideológica: el inicio de la Guerra Civil española.

[this interlude depicts a temporal drag, a queering of time and of space. Situated in a cemetery in Barcelona, Ocaña goes back to another time, before the dictatorship of Franco, to a historical moment saturated by the bloody political and ideological belligerence: to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.][4]

Beyond any simple going back (remontarse), Ocaña also disturbs and twists the temporal logic of the scene by inserting the author-figure of Lorca into the song he himself collected, collated and harmonised for the Colección, slowing the original zorongo down, and performing the song as if it were structured by the logic of cante jondo. The space of a Barcelona cemetery is cross-dressed to become Anadalusia, a projected cartographic ideality. And this ideality is overwritten with the virtuosic affect of cante jondo, queering time and genre, space and affect. In effect, then, space here is queered by its excessive symbolic over-writing and its opening out of potentialities, futures and pasts.

Flamenco's queernesses

In this article, responding to the incitement to queer flamenco enacted by Ocaña and Federico García Lorca, I explore the possibility that flamenco, in all its performative cathartic tragedy, is available to a queer reading. I do this not in an attempt to enact a recuperative or even appropriative reading, but in an attempt to explore the expansive possibilities afforded by queer readings and listenings, especially in relation to often uncritically invoked notions of 'tradition' in the flamenco field. Indeed, I want to go further than that to demonstrate that, at the heart of flamenco practice, there is a studied structural ambiguity that not only makes room for a queer reading, but that insists on it. It is my assertion that flamenco's relationships with gender, sexuality, identity and space are much more radically open and playful than traditional 'flamencological' readings have tended to allow and that, as a series of practices, as an 'epistemology', to use Timothy Mitchell's term,[5] and as a political project, flamenco produces space and time in ways that can and should be linked intimately to utopian thought.

5

As Timothy Dewaal Malefyt has persuasively shown, even within the many and conflicting domains of flamenco practice, there is no agreed narrative about how to distinguish between 'traditional' and 'commercial' flamenco, and moreover, the so-called aficionados that decry the popularity of 'commercial' flamenco nonetheless rely on a structural exaggeration of the distinction between 'tradition' and 'commerce' to emphasise the value of the local peña-centred production of flamenco.[6] The pervasive anxiety about authenticity that attends insider flamenco discourse is symptomatic, I would argue, of the broader socio-cultural processes bound up in what Heelas, Lash and Morris have termed 'detraditionalization', namely the delegitimization of church, patriarchy, state and community in the name of the flattened modernities of post-industrial societies.[7] That these anxieties are argued and deeply felt is taken for granted here, but I am also interested in exploring to what extent flamenco-specific logics for managing these apparently incommensurable experiences emerged in the first half of the twentieth century and also to what extent they continued to operate through the transition to democracy in Spain. What ways of re-ordering the tensions between tradition, modernity and truth are offered by flamenco? What strategies have flamenquistas and others used to negotiate the troubled waters of detraditionalization?

6

In a striking moment in Ocaña, not long after the scene in the cemetery, the artist speaks with pointed energy and conviction about what it means to be Andalusian: for him, it was as if his childhood were spent in a drugged haze, like an LSD trip, ensnared in the fantastical rituals of death and mourning, the splendid beatas or pious women attending funerals intoning prayers with a rosary, humming like black bees,[8] the glorious, strange and almost eroticised Christian symbolism of suffering, ecstasy, devotion and endless ritual, the suffocating hot afternoons without air or escape in which he learnt to commune with and utilise old truths and traditions. Ocaña's modernity, then, is fragile, written on flimsy paper, open to radical and permanent erasure. Santiago Fouz-Hernández and I recently wrote about what we termed the 'blasphemy continuum' in which critical and disturbing modernities (the urge, as Ocaña puts it, to 'destroy everything') enter into messy and contested relationships with traditions that would seem to refuse their own disavowal.[9] The urge to destroy and the urge to preserve, held together in a complex and precarious dance of desire in Andalusia, is precisely what this article sets out to explore. In particular, the article explores the relationship between tradition, modernity and the queer as played out in the romance cartographies of Andalusia's flamenco traditions. What, I want to ask, are the strategies flamenco uses to negotiate the apparently incommensurable tensions between the new and the traditional? How are those tensions realised or played out in flamenco? What ruptures, futurities, utopias, does flamenco imagine? The answer to all these questions, as I show below, is to be found in queerness.

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Flamenco's utopias

I want to begin by exploring this notion that flamenco can be seen to operate as a utopian form. It may seem strange to begin here of all places since flamenco has been understood as a vernacular fixation on tragedy. Most flamenquistas and flamencólogos, indeed, emphasise the uniquely intense forms of mourning that flamenco enacts, noting the almost obsessive fixation in flamenco letras [lyrics] on suffering, pain and despair. Antonio Machado Álbarez (known by his pseudonym 'Demófilo'), a key founding author of modern flamencology, insists on the tragic majesty of flamenco. As Inés María Luna Lopez puts it, 'El cante flamenco para Demófilo es la expresión melancólica y triste del alma, lo que une el flamenco a una concepción romántica del arte.' [Cante flamenco for Demófilo is the melancholic expression of the soul, it is that which unites flamenco with a romantic conception of art]. [10] And that view is still far from unusual. So why would I want to make the counter-claim that flamenco enacts utopian potentialities?

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To begin to answer that question, it is worth noting that Flamenco is a tradition in radical turmoil from the outset, beset by anxious authenticity debates and exaggerated claims to purity; according to Blas Infante, 'flamenco' (or rather his quite specific notion of it, and cante jondo or 'deep song' in particular) 'arrives' or comes to full fruition in the 1920s, marked by a highly developed genre system (the system of palos) and is constituted as a modern form, already contesting its own claims to tradition from within.[11] This narrative, running counter to the romantic narratives of classic flamencology (from Demófilo and his contemporaries), positions flamenco as a vernacular modernism (although he never puts it in those terms), which, like Harlem modernism and later post-war Afro-modernisms in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, can be understood as a series of intensely self-critical explorations of expression, selfhood, community and tradition.[12] And, like Harlem modernism, it identifies with, takes place in, and thematises, a specific array of places (in Andalusia). These places, I argue below, constitute mythic places, sites of transformation, of intense affective attachment to rituals of catharsis, and of utopian imaginaries bathed in queer brown sweating bodies, fixed in the virtuosic enactment of new ways of being. These are avowedly queer spaces.

9

One particularly suggestive consequence of Infante's revision of the flamenco narrative is the notion that flamenco exceeds and critiques its surface conformity to an ancient pre-industrial worldview and this is evidenced, in particular, in the shift from polyphony to what he terms la dramática [literally, the 'dramatic', here referring to the single-melody declamatory style so fundamental to cante jondo]:

10

Por qué la música de las canciones andaluzas, denominadas flamencas o jondas, hasta bien entrado el Renacimiento era lírica [...] y ahora es dramática o huraña a la socialización que supone la polifonía?

[Why was the music of Andalusian songs designated flamenco or jondo [deep] lyric well into the Renaissance [...] and [why] now is [it] dramatic or hostile to the socialisation [socio-cultural context] that assumed [the dominance of] polyphony?][13]

Not only are we to understand flamenco as a kind of trickster, confounding historical logic, but we are to understand it as a form that springs up to address what Infante terms 'nuevos estados sentimentales' [new emotional states]:

En efecto, las transformaciones flamencas operadas en la música andaluza, sobre su fondo antiguo lírico o coral, debieron de obedecer, según aquella ley, a la necesidad de expresar nuevos estados sentimentales o de conciencia, y el anhelo de expresión correspondiente a estos nuevos estados, tuvo que experimentar su tragedia in-formativa, desarrollada en la elaboración de una estructura o forma apropiados y de una técnica correspondiente a la novedad de esta forma.

[Indeed, the transformations enacted by flamenco on Andalusian music, on its ancient lyrical or choral grounding, had to obey the need to express, according to that law, new states of feeling or of consciousness; and the desire for forms of expression corresponding to these new states, meant that its entrained tragedy is forged in experimentation, developed in the production of an appropriate structure or form and from a technique corresponding to the novelty of that form.][14]

Infante thereby gives us leave to believe that flamenco engaged in an extremely complex and critical series of transformations, traceable to as late as the beginning of the twentieth century and made by both aficionados and practitioners alike, that revolutionised flamenco, changing it from a mere cultural onlooker or passive chronicler of social dispossession to a radicalised, politicised agent in shaping new cultural forms of expression. This, I would argue, is what draws us to the utopian claims of flamenco, to flamenco's agentive repositioning as a result, in particular (but not exclusively), of the work of Federico García Lorca, Manuel de Falla, Joaquín Turina, Federico Mompou, Conrado del Campo and Óscar Esplá.

Lorca himself made broad claims for cante jondo, insisting on both its ancient roots and its radical contemporaneity and, following Manuel de Falla's lead, identified the siguiriya as the cante tipo or originary genre of cante jondo:

11

La siguiriya gitana comienza por un grito terrible, un grito que divide el paisaje en dos hemisferios ideales. Es el grito de las generaciones muertas, la aguda elegía de los siglos desaparecidos, es la patética evocación del amor bajo otras lunas y otros vientos.

[The siguiriya opens with a terrible cry, a cry that divides the land into two ideal hemispheres. It's the cry of the dead generations, the shrill elegy of disappeared centuries, the pathos-laden evocation of love under other moons, other winds.][15]

The Orientalism of Lorca's vision, envisioning cante jondo as an 'emission that exceeds the voice' [una emisión más alta y más baja de la voz] and as a babbling, natural unmediated cry from ages past, belies the startling queerness of this vision. Here Lorca does not simply engage in the usual romantic misty-eyed exoticism of flamenco criticism, but also marks, as Stephen Hart has noted, 'the repressed presence of the subaltern, which, for reasons of race, religion, or ethnicity, 'lies' (in both sense of the term) on the wrong side of the law'.[16] Hart's evocation of the subaltern here, specifically Spivak's theorisation of it, is helpful in understanding the figure of the folk or pueblo (standing for the outsider-community, the disenfranchised collective, Spain's large and ancient lumpenproletariat, to use Timothy Mitchell's characterisation[17]) in Lorca's oeuvre.

What is utopian here, then, is precisely what José Esteban Muñoz understands as utopian in queerness:

12

Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive in the face of the here and now's totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.[18]

It is the openness, the not-yet-here-ness and the radicalising 'ideality' of queerness that affords it utopian potential and that helps explain the messy cross-temporalities and rhizometic cartographies of Ocaña and Lorca. The folding of time and space in Ocaña, and the voicing of the silenced others of modernism in Lorca, both constitute a refusal of the tyranny of the here and now and open us to the possibilities of new kinds of social relations, new ways of being both 'traditional' and 'modern'. One way to explore the utopian element of flamenco traditions is to look at some of the ways in which queerness and flamenquismo have been juxtaposed, intertwined and implicated in each other over the last 100 years or so, especially with regard to what queer theorists have referred to as 'virtuosity'. Muñoz implicates virtuosity in his utopian thought, drawing explicitly on both Bloch and Paulo Virno's Grammatica della moltitudine ['Grammar of the Multitude']:

... Virno speaks of the potential transformation offered by virtuosity. A certain modality of virtuosity offers an escape from a systemic mandate within capitalism to labor in order to produce a product. Although virtuosity can now be commodified like a traditional community, it nonetheless offers the potential for a certain escape or, as Virno puts it, an exit. Virno explains how virtuosity offers a certain defection from our current system. It, too, is a going off script. Virtuosity debunks production-based systems of value that make work and even cultural production drudgery and alienated debasement.[19]

In Virno, this notion of virtuosity [virtuosismo] is figured as a unique and challenging modality of production:

Let us consider carefully what defines the activity of virtuosos, of performing artists [artisti esecutori]. First of all, theirs is an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product, without settling into a "finished product," [un' opera] or into an object which would survive the performance. Secondly, it is an activity which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience.[20]

Indeed, focussing on Glenn Gould as his example, Virno goes further than Muñoz and seeks in particular to draw a distinction between virtuosity as a political act, and virtuosity as a closed-off reified mode of production:

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This great pianist paradoxically, hated the distinctive characteristics of his activity as a performing artist; to put it another way, he detested public exhibition [l'esibizione pubblico]. Throughout his life he fought against the "political dimension" [la politicità] intrinsic to his profession. At a certain point Gould declared that he wanted to abandon the 'active life' [la vita attiva], that is, the act of being exposed to the eyes of others (note: 'active life' is the traditional name for politics). In order to make his own virtuosity non-political, he sought to bring his activity as a performing artist as close as possible to the idea of labor [il lavoro], in the strictest sense, which leaves behind extrinsic products [prodotti estrinseci]. This meant closing himself inside a recording studio, passing off the production of records (excellent ones, by the way) as an 'end product' [un' opera]. In order to avoid the public-political dimension ingrained in virtuosity, he had to pretend that his masterly performances produced a defined object [oggetto definito] (independent of the performance itself). Where there is an end product, an autonomous product, there is labor, no longer virtuosity, nor, for that reason, politics.[21]

Gould's act of 'closing himself off' [chiudersi] represents for Virno a withdrawal from the political (utopian) potential of a labour that might have exceeded itself, that might have become a process for itself, not bound by the oggetto definito of normative productive labour. Hence, rather like the English urban professional's withdrawal into the soundproof study in the late nineteenth century described by John Picker, Gould seeks to remove himself from the fray of the political as such and, according to Virno's argument, thereby closes down the utopian potential of the virtuosic.[22] This is a process of professionalization, a way of marking out the productive and normative value of musical performance and a refusal of its radical potential.

14

In autochthonous debates among aficionados about flamenco practice, virtuosity has a problematic function. Peter Manuel has suggested that the professionalization of flamenco and the rise of virtuosity among flamenco guitarists go hand in hand.[23] And yet, the long history of flamenco's withdrawal into the recording studio has also engendered a culture of close listening among emerging practitioners, especially with regard to the famous recordings by Camarón de la Isla and Paco de Lucía between 1969 and 1977. In this context, then, Virno's theory of virtuosity seems at odds with flamenco practices, marked as they are by very early engagements with sound recording technologies. As early as 1899, for example, the great cantaor [flamenco singer] Antonio Chacón recorded some 11,000 wax cylinders. And key exponents of flamenco were recording regularly throughout the 1910s and '20s. Hence, in flamenco practice there would appear to be something fundamentally at odds with a Virnoan understanding of virtuosity as utopian, or potentially subversive of normative modes of production.

15

Yet, to understand the utopian potential of flamenco we need to understand also that its relationship with recording technology is not a 'withdrawal' but fundamentally a re-imagination of the terms on which vernacular arts are to be disseminated. Recording technology, rather than a 'withdrawal', comes to represent a means to a virtuosic end, in the terms that Virno understands it. Francisco Bethencourt y Llobet has recently shown how flamenco guitarists from the generations after Paco de Lucía, for example, have learnt from, among other things, recordings. Bethencourt y Llobet interviews Gerardo Nuñez about this phenomenon and Nuñez has the following to say:

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Empezó para nosotros en el momento en el que podíamos comprar un casette y escuchar música de otro tipo. Antes de eso teníamos sólo el tocadiscos y los discos de Sabicas... entonces Paco de Lucía se conocía, pero no había tenido aún tanto éxito. Y aprendíamos porque somos músicos de oído.[24]

[For us it began back in the days when we could buy a tape player and listen to other kinds of music. Before that we just had the record player and our Sabicas albums... in those days Paco de Lucía was just starting to get attention, but he still wasn't so successful. And we learned from it, because we are musicians who learned to play by ear.]

Indeed, this phenomenon in particular, along with other forms of transmission (Bethencourt y Llobet lists 'the city', 'the maestro' and other environments and agents in this process), is key to the way in which flamenco artists now learn. Rather than representing a retreat, sound recording technologies engender new forms of virtuosity, enabling a highly detailed and analytical mode of listening that contributed to the development of a complex virtuosic style of playing pioneered by, among others, Paco de Lucía and Sabicas (Agustín Castellón Campos):

YYo empecé con un Picú, un tocadisco de estos que giraban, con discos de vinilo …yo cogía los discos de Sabicas y la dificultad nuestra era que coincidiera la ahuja al principio de la falseta. Estropeabamos discos ahujas, de todo… ahora en mi caso tenemos la tecnología punta [...][25]

[I started with a pick up, and a record player; one of those turntables for vinyl disks... I found Sabicas's albums and wanted to listen to them but the major difficulty was when trying to put the stylus at the beginning of the falseta [...] we broke needles and everything. Nowadays, I have the latest technology.]

The falseta, like a short Durchbruch of virtuosity into the flamenco texture, is common to most of the flamenco palos or song-types. It consists of a short melodic interlude for the guitar, often at the beginning of a verse, before the singer enters, or can accompany the dancer. They are often highly ornate, and frequently (when operating in that mode) orientate towards the tono dórico or final of what North European musicology now terms the phrygian mode [modo frígio, formerly modo dórico] a term that some contemporary flamencologists also now adopt.[26] The characteristic first-step semitone of the modo dórico/frígio and the 'pull' of the final is used playfully in the falseta, delaying the run down onto the final by misdirection and virtuosic obfuscation. This staging of virtuosity, like a small interlude in the cante is, arguably, a fundamentally post-sound-recording phenomenon, enacted as a result of the embedding of new forms of listening and copying into the flamenco regimen. Hence, as we see from Nuñez's experience, flamenco musicians learn in ways not unlike popular musicians.[27] They use recordings as a way of getting inside the idiom, and also, it would seem that for some this is a way of sidestepping the more hierarchical and exclusive systems of traditional flamenco pedagogy that have attended the maestro-system.

Flamenco's queer modernities

Flamenco presents itself as, and is deeply attached to an imagination of, performance. The spaces in which flamenco is performed have become imbued with mythological significance, and represent a delicately differentiated array of audiences and practices: the peña stands for a grass-roots site, a place where aficionados seek out the unadulterated roots of flamenco practice, free from the (putatively) false showiness of so-called 'commercial' flamenco; the tablao, conversely, has become marked with the noise interference brought by stranger non-aficionados. As Timothy Dewaal Malefyt puts it, 'Differences between traditional and commercial flamenco emerge in how the intimate space of peñas contrasts to the open social space of public establishments. While flamenco in peñas is usually held for locals only, flamenco in commercial establishments is accessible to anyone.'[28]

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Beyond this crude binarism (beyond, that is, the authoritarian rules that normatively bifurcate flamenco production in this manner), other logics and imaginations of space can also be seen at work in the worlds that flamenco opens up. These other imaginations, I would argue, are indebted to the production of utopian space and place (in the sense outlined by Henri Lefebvre[29]) structured by both a deeply felt historicising drive and a refusal of the straightjacket of what Robert Harbison called the 'deliberate regression' of vernacular-inflected modernisms of the first half of the twentieth century.[30] Indeed, the avant-garde primitivism that Harbison recognises in European and North American Modernisms of the first half of the twentieth century is readable not simply as a regression, but also as a critical refusal of the dehumanising processes of the modern city: in their fascinations for (putatively) ancient vernaculars, artists and composers struggled to negotiate shockingly rapid urban transformations.

18

Lorca himself makes this clear when, during his trip to New York in 1929-30, he describes in a letter to his family 'un prodigioso e imponente paisaje de edificios y ríos' ['a prodigious and impressive landscape of buildings and rivers'] and finds himself longing for the (now nostalgically mythologised) spaces of flamenco: 'Me acuerdo de la taberna del Polinario con un ciprés, y una silla rota] [I remember the Taberna del Polinario with a cypress tree and a broken seat].[31] It was here in New York that Lorca wrote the extended detailed version of his 1922 lecture on cante jondo, renamed for this event 'Arquitectura del cante jondo' (1929-30) which he delivered in Havana, Cuba, in 1930 and again in Buenos Aires and then at the Salón Imperial in Seville in 1932. Hand in hand with this, it is also in New York, of course, that he encounters black musical culture for the first time, thanks to the African-American writer Nella Larsen who served as his guide. Lorca makes clear the parallels that exist for him between black music and cante jondo in a letter to his family in 1929, in which he writes: 'Pero que maravilla de cantos! Sólo se puede comparar con ellos el cante jondo' ['What miraculous songs! One can only compare them to cante jondo].[32] His longing for the mythical sites of flamenco production is as much about homesickness as it is about alienation. Yet there is nonetheless an interesting juxtaposition at work between Lorca's 'regression' into cante jondo and his enthusiastic embrace of Harlem modernism in Poeta en Nuevo York:

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¡Ay, Harlem! ¡Ay, Harlem! ¡Ay, Harlem!

No hay angustia comparable a tus rojos oprimidos,

a tu sangre estremecida dentro del eclipse oscuro,

a tu violencia granate, sordomuda en la penumbra,

a tu gran rey prisionero, con un traje de conserje.[33]

[O Harlem! O Harlem! O Harlem!

There is no anguish comparable to your red oppressed,

To your shuddering blood in a dark eclipse

To your violent garnet, deaf and dumb in the half-light

To your great prisoner king, in a custodian's uniform]

The intense open-ended expressive language of feelings, bearing the traces of his newly discovered fascination for the English-language Moderns, especially T. S. Elliot and Walt Whitman, again suggests parallels between Lorca's cante jondo and the music of Harlem:

Es preciso cruzar los puentes

y llegar al rumor negro

para que el perfume de pulmón

nos golpee las sienes con su vestido

de caliente piña. Es preciso matar al rubio vendedor de aguardiente,

a todos los amigos de la manzana y de la arena;

y es necesario dar con los puños cerrados

a las pequeñas judías que tiemblan llenas de burbujas,

para que el rey de Harlem cante con su muchedumbre,

para que los cocodrilos duerman en largas filas

bajo el amianto de la luna,

y para que nadie dude la infinita belleza

de los plumeros, los ralladores, los cobres y las cacerolas de las cocinas.

[You have to cross the bridges

and reach the black murmur

so that the scent of lungs

hits your temples, dressed

in warm pineapple.

You must kill the blond-haired brandy-seller

and every friend of sand and apple

and with clenched fists you must beat

the trembling little Jewish women full of bubbles

so the king of Harlem may sing with his throng,

the crocodiles sleep in long rows

beneath the moon's asbestos,

and no one doubt the infinite beauty

of dusters, graters, copperware, kitchen pans.][34]

Lorca tells us that there is a particular passage we have to take in order to 'reach' ['llegar a'] the song of the prisoner king and his throng ['muchedumbre'], one that necessitates a crossing of 'bridges'; it marks the improvised tumble-down space of Harlem as distant, removed, mythical, like a far-away prison society, the walls of which cannot be breached: 'A la izquierda, a la derecha, por el Sur y por el Norte, se levanta el muro impasible' ['To the left, to the right, south and north, the wall rises impervious'].[35] The murmur of Harlem ['el rumor de Harlem'], voices thronging together, the king dissolving into the mass, wearing his custodian's garb, all point to a modelling of creative practice that is profoundly collective and yet not one beholden to romantic or idealised notions of community.

On the one hand, we can say that the song of the 'king', and the black murmur that flanks him, together constitute traces of a specific musical vernacular, a real cultural form that is taken by Lorca as a marker of racial, socio-economic and cultural difference; his conjuring of Harlem here constitutes therefore a kind of exoticism. On the other hand, Lorca is clearly also interested in what Deleuze and Guattari have since called 'a pure and intense sonorous material', one that is,

20

toujours en rapport avec sa propre abolition, son musical déterritorialisé, cri qui échappe à la signification, à la composition, au chant, à la parole, sonorité en rupture pour se dégager d'une chaîne encore trop signifiante. Dans le son, seule compte l'intensité, généralement monotone, toujours asignifiante;[36]

[always connected to its own abolition—a deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes signification, composition, song, words—a sonority that ruptures in order to break away from a chain that is still all too signifying. In sound, intensity alone matters, and such sound is generally monotone and always nonsignifying;][37]

Although Deleuze and Guattari are speaking of Franz Kafka here, the parallels with Lorca are striking and, in particular, this notion of a sound for itself, one that 'escapes signification' ['échappe à la signification'] helps us understand Lorca's investment in Harlem here not merely as an uncritical exoticism (although we cannot put this to one side completely), but also as a way of flattening the distance between his own Andalusian racial imaginary and the racial and socio-economic specificities of the city of cities, New York. This undifferentiated sound, this son musical déterritorialisé, enables equivalences to be drawn between non-signifying lumps of pre-cultural 'stuff', freed from their local geo-historical specificities; this is how Lorca is able to negotiate the gap between modernity and tradition, between his profound and deep attachment to the ancient rituals of Andalusia and the devastating alienations of the city. Moreover, for Lorca, the very special intense and terrifying modernity of Harlem rises like a prison wall, suffocates and yet, paradox after paradox, offers its own song, its own voice of the prisoner king and his throng, a murmur, a hum. This is modernism's paradox, the fetishization of that which it loathes the most: the urban modernity that steals, bends and destroys the song of the everyday whilst nonetheless valorising that self-same modernity, as a locus classicus of the modern troubled subject. Indeed, when Lorca fixates on the broken chair of the Taberna del Polinario in Granada, he inadvertently points to that extraordinary incommensurateness, that terrible impasse that stalks the modern subject: nowhere to sit, nowhere from which to observe, no centre at which to locate oneself, feeling always displaced, subsisting always in a state of emergency. Lorca's broken seat marks a line of flight, an exit trajectory: the troubled subject perches precariously on a yet-to-be fixed seat, imagining change, imagining futurities.

Flamenco urbanities

A domestic mise-en-scène. Close up on a pair of high-heel shoes on a welcome mat. A woman arriving home. She wipes her feet carefully before entering her flat. Cut to the interior of the kitchen, cluttered, open shelves packed with pans and spices; a middle-aged male figure centre of shot, chopping garlic and onions. No music, only diegetic sound. They talk, she then goes to the next room, he prepares her a drink and takes it through to her, as she lies on the sofa, her red dress merging into a large red cushion, contrasting with the pale yellow of the sofa. He says: 'te tumbas como un tío para ver la televisión' ['you lie like a man to watch the TV'] and she responds 'No sabía yo que tumbarse en el sofá fuera cosa de hombres' ['I didn't know that lying on the sofa was a man thing']. She sits up and makes room for him. She is desperate to leave him and tentatively suggests they separate, he gets angry. He hits her across the face, gets up, caresses her menacingly from behind the sofa, 'perdóname' ['forgive me'] and exits. Guitar chord, upper voice falling from the 5th to 4th degree of the phrygian scale, the camera pans slowly to the left and rests on a stylised cartoon-like image of the wife when she was younger, with a large peineta and roses in her hair, and stylized curls breaking the otherwise stark hairline. She looks like a bailaora, a flamenco dancer. Cut. We are now outside somewhere, and then begins a gentle falseta: a run from the 2nd up to the 5th degree, several more soundings of that falling 5-4 figure, then finally, but only at the end of an ornamental melisma struck only on the first note, we fall briefly to the final in a weak phrygian cadence. This curtailed cadence transitions from a scene of domestic violence, to a long shot across an urban landscape scarred by thorough-going and rapid urban redevelopment (like a scene from the opening of Roberto's Rosselini's Germannia anno zero [Italy, 1948]) as if a great disaster had befallen the landscape. The protagonist, a young man in his late 20s, emerges from his home, locks the back gate, throws his backpack over his shoulder and walks into the rubble-filled landscape, strewn with the ruins of lives past, a space of aftermaths. Cut to an older man (in his late 30s) sitting at the wheel of a car with a camera in hand, watching the protagonist from a distance. The guitar falseta in the soundtrack ends with another descent onto the final, another (this time full) phrygian cadence, and the cantaora begins to sing 'El rosario de mi madre':

21

Aunque no creas tú, como que me oye dios

Esta será la última cita de los dos

Comprenderás que es por demás

Que te empeñes en fingir

[...] un mal dolor

Ay, no es como para morir.

Pero desecha ya

Aquella ilusión

A nadie del mundo

Daré mi corazón

[Even though you may not believe it, as God is my witness

This will be our last meeting

You will understand even

If you insist on pretending.

A bad pain

Is not like dying.

Abandon now

That illusion.

I will not give my heart

To anyone on the world]

The song is a canción aflamencada [a flamenco-inflected version of a song], and was originally composed (before its flamenco inflection) by Peruvian songwriter Mario Cavagnaro (released in 1961 in Peru) and first performed by the Peruvian group Los Troveros Criollos. This was originally a vals criollo (lit. a 'creole waltz'), a form elaborated from the European waltz brought to Peru by the Spanish in the 19^th century.[38] The flamenco version here is from the 1990 album Duqende con Manzanita on the Divucsa label, and the original vals is almost unrecognisable: it has all but disappeared and has been replaced by melismatic bulerías-style vocalisations (in 12 rather than 3). It is sung by the famous cantaor [flamenco singer] Duquende (Juan Rafael Cortés Santiago) with Manzanita (José Manuel Ortega Heredia) on guitar. It is a song about anger, about voicing a terrible disappointment at some unnamed betrayal, and about losing trust: 'Devuélveme mi amor para matarlo /... / Tú no eres quien merece conservarlo ['Return my love to me so that I can kill it /... / You are not the one who deserves to keep it'].

As Duquende sings, the young man is reflected in the wing mirror of the older man's car as he strides across the devastated landscape; then the camera panning upwards to reveal a huge modern tower (one of a pair now forming the Puerta de Europa on the northern end of the Plaza de Castilla in the Chamartín district of Madrid): this ruined landscape is soon to be erased completely in favour of an outward-facing European/global Madrid. Cut. The tower from a different angle, leaning into the street as Duquende sings 'desecha ya' ['now abandon'], with a long melisma on 'ya' falling again onto the final, marking a full phrygian cadence. The young man climbs onto a bus, just as Duquende settles on a second longer melisma on 'corazón' ['heart]. The man in the car follows the bus through Madrid, Duquende singing all the while until, on the last couplet below ['Lo tuyo ... '], the bus arrives and drops the young man off at his destination:

22

Devuélveme el rosario de mi madre

Y quédate con todo lo demás

Lo tuyo te lo envió cualquier tarde

No quiero que me veas nunca mas

[Return my mother's rosary beads

Keep everything else

I send your things to you any evening

You are not to see me anymore.]

Throughout this short scene, the camera concentrates on the face of the older man through the windscreen of the car, tracing what he sees, swinging between the long shots that frame the young man and the close ups of the driver. The driver's face is wrought with anxiety, with the horror of an emerging truth: this young man has come to take away his love forever.

This scene, from Pedro Almodóvar's Carne Trémula / Live Flesh (Spain, 1990), focuses our attention on the affect of the man in the car, written on his face, never his body (which remains invisible throughout); he is about to be betrayed and he knows it. His fear and anxiety are reflected, almost too crudely, in the canción aflamencado, the lyrics of the original vals criollo heaping intensity on the scene. The young man in the distance is a mere graphism, his face barely visible; he drifts across the broken urban space like a ghost. The man in the car, conversely, takes up the position of the gaze, the anxious embattled subject. Yet Duquende's words and Manzanita's guitar offer us something more: they point to the cinematic conventions of the scene, to the artifice of the cinematic mode of production and the mechanisms by which affect is manipulated. The melodrama here is precisely this, melodrama, a drama writ by or through a musical logic. The music effects a radical disturbance in the naturalistic flow of images, refusing both the heteronormative function of the family unit (beset here by violence) and the normative function of images in narrative cinema. The music, resolutely (almost aggressively) non-diegetic, organises the affect of the scene whilst also detracting from its authenticity. Flamenco here is a music of destabilisation, of the outside, of dangerous but thrilling transition, transgression, but also a music of mourning, of anger and dispossession: it is all these things at once, folding time, space and the conventions of narrative. This delicate intensity, this lingering uncertainty, like the broken chair at the Polinario in Lorca's letter from New York to his family, holds open pathways to futures, holds the subject in a queer vortex of possibilities. As Muñoz puts it, 'It is productive to think about utopia as flux, a temporal disorganization, a moment when the here and now is transcended by a then and there that could be and should be.'[39]

23

Conclusion: Staging flamenco

In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz argues that utopia must be 'staged', in order to be 'enacted'. His argument, drawing as we have seen from both Virno and Bloch, is that 'utopian performativity suggests another modality of doing and being that is in process, unfinished. It is to be deciphered by noting what Bloch has called the anticipatory illumination that radiates from certain works of art.'[40] Flamenco, then, in its emphasis on virtuosic performativity, and in its 'staged' [enacted] performances, represents one such potentiality, one such futurity. Imagine a black and white photograph of a stage (I am deliberately staging a cross-dressing performance of Muñoz's analysis of photographs of stages in gay clubs in Los Angeles). My imaginary photograph is old and slightly damaged. The stage is bare visible through creases, old finger prints. The stage raised above the audience's seating, it seems about five metres across, enclosed on all sides by bare white walls. Four chairs, empty, in the centre. The stage is not lit, except with ambient lighting from the rest of the tablao. The interior lighting makes it difficult to know whether this is an aftermath, an in-between or a beforehand. It is raw. Grainy. Just as for the photos in Muñoz's analysis, we have no way of knowing how to take up a relation with this potentiality, this imaginary photo is radically open. The stage is a site. It is the frame, the raised platform of flamenco tablao performance; this raised platform is mistrusted by aficionados for its enabling of showiness and 'stagedness'. But staging, framing, drawing our attention to the machinery of representation is also to point both to the emptiness of the image and that image's potential to exceed that machinery. It stands for what Muñoz terms 'a circuit of queer belonging',[41] a feedback space of memories and anticipations in which flamenco enacts itself.

24

The tablao is a queer space. Queer on many counts: a site of transgression, of stagedness, showiness, spectacularisation, a kind of perverse transvestism from the peña across to the world of commerce, of (global) capital, tourism, strangers and their delicate alienation; a site of open-ended fleeting belongings, charged with frisson and possibility; a site of intense identifications, supercharged affects, virtuosic risks and professional musical dangers. But even this is not enough. Even this does not grasp the complexity of the tablao. These spaces are queer spaces only because they are enacted as such over and over, every night without end. Flamenco queerness is performed, made again from scratch every night, with a new audience, enacting brand new social relations. Flamenco must recolonise its public spaces because, like the queerness it enacts, it is not guaranteed its spaces by heteronormative hegemonies that normatively command the public. The tablao does not forge surrogate families, nor does it engage in what Miranda Joseph has termed the 'romance of community'.[42] It refuses that comfort, and insists on the transient, fleeting, mis-identifications of cathartic diversion, entertainment; it insists on tourist investments in the exotic (racial) other. Of course, these investments are granular; they do not reduce simply to the interaction of tourists and their consumption of exotics; they are shot-through with micro-identifications, with aficionados unmoored from their peñas, with academic-fans embroiled in the authenticity fantasy, with strangers to flamenco surprised, challenged or disturbed at the voz afillá of the cantaor/a, and those who leave unmoved, without having been changed at all.

25

Staging flamenco at the tablao, then, is about cross-dressing across from the earnest romance of community enacted in the peñas to something else, but it is not about leaving the peña or the traditional cueva behind: it is also about honouring, and in some sense maintaining fidelity to, those traditional (insider) spaces. Ocaña's enactment of flamenco, for example, and her invocation of Lorca's queer imagination of flamenco, is not some abandonment of the traditional, but a calling into being of an alignment of the traditional with the utopian. Ocaña does not transgress flamenco, or cast away its palo system or override its specific historicity. Nor does she break away from the conventions of vocalisation required by flamenco convention. The performance in the cemetery, framed like a tablao stage by the tombs of the dead, is highly competent, showing intense and deep insider familiarity with the language and gesture of flamenco rituals. The same fidelity and attention to melisma, inflection, timbre and vocal production is shown by Ocaña when, later in Ventura Pons's documentary, she sings a saeta, a religious song form heavily influenced by flamenco modes of performance from Andalusia. The saeta is usually sung during Holy Week, by a single unaccompanied voice (male or female), and its lyrics are usually intensely sorrowful. Ocaña frames this performance shortly afterwards in a brief interview section as himself, where he states

26

It fucks me when people coming from university try to suppress these celebrations for the older women. [These are] their fetishes. And I say: 'That's fine but, what do they get in exchange?' Nothing. Then why do away with it? To see La Macarena on the street full of carnations, with such a divine face. To see the Star of Triana. To see the Virgin of Montensión. The Virgins of Seville are tears. They're like mothers crying at the prison door for their sons to be released and go back home. And all those Virgins cry. Well it's a constant contradiction. A Virgin cries and a Civil Guard carries a gun. Andalusia is like a surrealist painting.

The streets, tablaos, theatres, churches and Virgins of Andalusia clearly sustain Ocaña in an important way, and s/he shows fidelity to these rituals and spaces without being uncritical of the worldview of the church and traditional (rural, Franco-era) Andalusian attitudes: indeed, he critiques the church for its hypocrisy and makes it clear throughout the documentary that, for him, being true to the rituals of his youth whilst also being 'who he is' is a contradiction he must negotiate:

All of this is a fetish [un fetiche]. It's the result of a catholic education. For me, what remains from the church are these fetishes, because everything priests had said bothered me much later on. At times some things are unjust and I am inclined then to believe they are contradictions, but they aren't because the saints, these fetishes, belong to the people [son del pueblo].

Here, then, the outlines of a way of thinking about tradition and utopia emerge: the saints, 'son del pubelo' [they belong to the people], he says, as if being able to plunge these images back into the traditional popular spaces of their usage (the term 'pueblo', meaning 'people' also means 'village' in Spanish) might wash them of their duplicity. This return to the pueblo, a kind of studied 'regression' also queers the fetishes by emptying them of their certainty, aestheticizing them, and detaching them from the attitudes that oppressed him so brutally as a child and young man. His 'fetishes' are neither completely severed from their histories, nor completely attached to them, but float precariously between parody and commitment.

In this article, then, I have suggested that, at the heart of flamenco practice, there is a structural ambiguity that not only makes room for a queer reading, but that insists on it. I have located this ambiguity at the heart of the modernist project, but also at the heart of the new re-traditionalisation that attended flamenco in the wake of the 1922 concurso de cante jondo. Lorca's insistence on flamenco (especially cante jondo) as art, and his embroilment in and rejection of 'deliberate transgression', articulate not simply the challenge of bringing cante jondo into a productive and meaningful relationship with the aesthetic concerns of European modernism, but also with subterranean space- and time-bending utopian traditions that promised much more than a mere despairing investment in exotic others. This queer utopian trajectory, of course, was brutally interrupted by Lorca's murder in 1936 by fascist malitia. In Ocaña, that interrupted narrative is not simply taken up and continued, but s/he also bears witness to the brutal interruption of that narrative: '¿Dónde está tu cuerpo santo? / Que no tuvo ni sepultura' [Where is your holy body? He had no burial]. To merely continue where Lorca left of is not enough. This is more than mere mournful homage. It is, I would argue, an urgent call to step beyond the here and now, and to stitch utopian narratives and counter-narratives together that resist the brutalities of expediency, and call for what Muñoz refers to as a new 'collective political becoming'.[43] The cemetery becomes a tablao, which becomes Andalusia, which becomes all the espacios queer that promise futurities beyond those sanctioned by the here and now. In this sense, the queer spaces of flamenco are never finished, but always being produced, always under construction. They are spaces that subsist under other moons, other winds.

27

Notes

Bibliography

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Domènech, Conxcita and Andrès Lema-Hincapié (eds.), Ventura Pons: Una Mirada excepcional desde el cine catalán (Madrid: Iberoamericanos, 2015).

Green, Lucy, How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

Harbison, Robert, Deliberate Regression (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).

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Maurer, Christopher and Andrew A. Anderson (eds.), Epistolario completo (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997).

Mitchell, Timothy, Flamenco Deep Song (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994).

Muñoz, Jose Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

Picker, John M., Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Shaw, Lisa and Robin Stone (eds.), Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).

Virno, Paulo, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [Semiotexte], 2004), 22. Italian edition: Grammatica della moltitudine: per una analisi delle forme di vita contemporanee (Catanzaro: Rubettino, 2001).