This Spanish male dancer knelt down affectionately on the Shanghai stage, putting on a skirt
A group of old men, dressed in gorgeous dresses and with a slightly comical art style at first glance, are eagerly awaited performances by flamenco dance enthusiasts. On September 14-15, Flamenco's "Long live!" was performed at the Shanghai International Dance Center.
This is the first time that the Spanish dance troupe Manuel Linan has visited China to perform, and it is also the first Asian performance of this work.
Manuel Linan and his dancers conquered audiences in the Asian region.
Manuel Linan, the director of "Long Live!", has won the Spanish National Dance Award and this year was nominated for the Oliver Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance with "Long Live!".
Li Nan and his dancers perform with rich layers and full of physical tension, and "Long Live!" is regarded by the industry as the "pinnacle of his artistic life. Since its premiere in Madrid in 2019, the work has been invited to participate in the Flamenco Art Festival in New York, USA, and has performed in multiple performances worldwide, with few votes available. It has been praised by Spanish newspaper critic Roger Salas as "the best version of Flamenco and Spanish dance".
To summarize the two main features of this work, one is the use of an all male dancer team to perform traditional flamenco female dance; The second is to achieve a return to traditional flamenco dance, from music to clothing aesthetics, and then to dance.
In fact, using male dancers to "cross star" female roles has its own origin. Renowned British dancer Matthew Burn once created a male version of Swan Lake, which became an important work that shook the contemporary dance industry. And Manuel Linan is often compared to Matthew Bourne for his "male version" of Flamengo.
In 2019, Matthew Burn's male version of "Swan Lake" came to the stage of Shanghai Cultural Square and was hard to come by.
Flamenco dance expresses the passionate and unyielding spirit of the Latin nation. Its sense of intensity, rhythm, and narrative are all powerful and infectious, while male dancers wearing skirts to perform flamenco can present a body shape and explosive power that is different from that of women.
The return to traditional flamenco dance in "Long Live!" is a nostalgic memory from Linan: he loved traditional flamenco dance in his teens, and this style has always influenced his creations.
Since the 1980s, the new flamenco has replaced the traditional flamenco, without pleated skirts, shawls, and hair accessories, as well as traditional music and music. Linan went against the trend and returned to tradition. Dancers appeared in extremely bright long tail dance dresses, draped in shoulder scarves with long tassels, wearing bright and flamboyant flowers and hair accessories, with dark hair curled up, showcasing the beauty of Flamenco's retro tradition.
After the performance, the audience refused to leave for a long time and used their hands to beat the classic rhythm of flamenco dance in the audience.
The enthusiasm of the audience deeply infected Linan and his dance troupe members. They repeatedly took the stage to bid farewell, and even walked up to the stage, kneeling affectionately to pay tribute to the audience.
Finally, during an impromptu performance of a traditional Spanish song by a dancer, the entire group came to an end while singing and dancing.
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