A personal flamenco journey 13

           3 Let 'Back to Heaven' be danced!

 

                      

 

 

 

 Were 'Back to Heaven' expressed on flamenco baile! This was inspired by the below words of a Spanish  bailaora ,Evs Yerbueneva: a poem can be pure dance.I think a poet dreams of seeing his verse sketched out on a human body and a bailaor dreams of seeing his dancing in a poem.

 

 

 

 Solea or Sigyuria, a form of baile was, it was hard to explain of it, reminded of by the speedy flow of the  first phrase of the poem ,' I shall return to heaven' . Solea is the ｅxpression inside of an individual of his or( her) sorrow and solitude.  The meaning hidden between the lines of the poem recalled the solea, a form of flamenco cante.

 

 

 

As for flamenco, it has long been the practice to speak of flamanco artists- a term rarely used when discussing folk music.... The el arte flamenco- these words describe an art form that is fed from two sources: joy and sorrow. Soul and body must be in perfect harmony: intellegence governs the voice ,heart convey s the contents.  Here I would like to add one more: the downwardness, one of the main characteristics of flamenco baile. It is related with The zapateado, that is, the creation of rhythms by drumming on the ground with the feet. It is worth pointing out how important it is.

 

 

 

The dances uses the whole body , but it is largely generated by these drummed rhythm. To create its patterns, the dancers makes variations in the quality and intensity of sound by using the heel ,the whole foot, the sole and the the point of the toe. All these movements tend toward a stamping downward. By the same token there are no leaps, no upward movements of any sort. The downwardness of the dance also shows in the eyes, which are usually 'directed downward even when the face turns up.'

 

 

 

The idea that 'Back to Heaven can be deep baile of flamenco' was inspired by the two particular performances held in 2005 at Masan and Haman, in which Morning Dews, as you know, was  sketched out  2 times through the body of Lau, a flamenco bailaora on the stage.

 

 

 

 

 

I shall return to heaven

 

  hand in hand with dews

 

  evaporated at the touch of the dawn light

 

 

 

  I shall return to heaven

 

  together with  the evening glow light

 

  at the cloud's calling sign to me in the play at the hill foot

 

 

 

  I shall return to heaven

 

  when the picknic is over on this earth

 

  and go there to say  it  was beautiful

 

 

 

 

The above poem of Back to Heaven has of course a couple of musics, which I don't love because they are, I think, unable to express the poet's spirit. In case of Morning Dews, I personally preferred the music to the poem itself. So I gave the poet only in order for her to follow her emotion in solea free of any existing music for the poem.

 

 

 

This poem reminded me of ' a child' in the book of <Also sprach Zarathustra> written by Friedrich Nietzsche. While in my youth The song of Morning Dew brought up the image of the invincible paws of 'a lion' in the book, in the case of the poem Back to Heaven, it was a child's blue soul that I was reminded of when I read it. Nietzsche once have said of thrice changes of the mind.

 

 

 

 The wise man advised we should learn camels first. Everybody knows that the camel symbolizes endurance. What we have to learn next ,he said, is the lion's spirit: the beast is the symbol of invincible courage to say 'no' against unholy duties . And he went on, 'lastly learn to be a child'. What he meant by it was that in order to keep creative instinct we have to learn the pure oblivion and affirmation. Perhaps when the poetic inspiration hit the poet Chun, Sang Byung, he must have been a child whose soul was blue.

 

 

 

  Sensing a stoic far-sighted view of the unworldly poet in Back to Heaven, lucid and crystal, I wished it to be expressed through the deep baile of Lau who had danced twice Morning Dews twice before the Korean views here in Korea. I am sure that Lau as a bailaora would express well the agony and sorrow hidden in the mind of the poet through her body. In addition she has had a good understanding of the Korean lyricism.

 

 

 

 SB Chun, the poet of Back to Heaven, prisoned and put to torture under the military dictatorship through 1970s, was ill-fated in the latter half of his life with the deep scar never to be recovered from. In a sense, that while Morning Dews symbolized a torch of resistance, Back to Heaven is still with us as the child.

 

 

 

  I don't want the soul of the poet to return to the heaven. I don't want the poet to be allowed to fly to the high sky, too far off and too remote from the world we live. At this junction, The downwardness of flamenco baile solo ,it seemed, could help us to keep the poet alive by our side as ever.

 

 

 

I wish the poet to live with us down in this earth, not up in heaven, as the twinkling morning dews, the evening glow of hymn, and the creative soul of the child, getting our mind's eyes ,easy to be dull, purified . For the deep baile of flamenco, downward and introvert, is a deep song of this earth itself, not one of that heaven .

 

 

 

And one thing should never be forgotten to add: please have the baile dance for Back to Heaven accompanied for sure by the guitar only, the soul of flamenco.

 

 

 

The cry

 

of the guitar begins.

 

The crystals of dawn

 

shatter.

 

The wail

 

of the guitar begins.

 

It is useless to silence it.

 

It is impossible

 

to silence it.

 

It cries monotonously

 

like water cries,

 

like wind cries

 

over frozon peaks.

 

It is impossible

 

to silence it.

 

It bemoans

 

distant things.

 

It is the hot Southern sand

 

craving white camellias.

 

It is an arrow without destination,

 

the afternoon without tomorrow.

 

 

 

Gh