Flamenco Storm took Several Years off the Life of the Stage

14.08.2006

Summer Festival: First-class concert with Bettina Castaño and Hakim Ludin

Bensheim. A tribute to the lightness of gravity. For three hours it whirled, stomped and spun, musical clichés were kicked away with toetips. A big bang of erotic flamenco and percussive elegance, a highly dynamic liaison of virtuostic brilliance and unbridled lust for dance.

It was a summit of rhythm in and of itself, which took several years off the life of the small stage in the community center. Bettina Castaño lives flamenco. The inexhaustible wealth of choreographies and artistic fusions needs almost no time to spread through the auditorium and infect the audience.

Powerful and delicate, proud and full of enthusiasm, Bettina Castaño defies gravity and surrenders herself to the intensity of flamenco. Ticklish music which settles somewhere between your ears and your gut and starts your heart vibrating. A mélange of movement, sound and expressiveness becomes an exhilarating and sometimes cathartic experience.

In a wonderful way, Bettina Castaño embodies disciplined energy and musical intelligence which moved the audience on Saturday evening to thunderous applause.

“Flamenco meets Orient” is one facet of the limitless repertoire of the woman from Seville who keeps the world in suspense as the spearhead of a new flamenco generation. Her many affairs with classical and tango, gypsy and even Swiss string music manifest the artistic mentality of a true star who expresses the elementary awareness of life with body and soul. The close collaboration with the world-class percussionist Hakim Ludin from Kabul is a “perfect match” which ones’ ears don’t hear every day: highly dynamic rhythms with a magical pedigree which melt into Spanish guitars and build up a beguilingly infectious fusion of sound. The Afghani and Indian influences of flamenco are bared and refined with Bettina Castaño’s choreographic brilliance.

As the first flamenco dancer in the world she danced the Spanish solo dance Zapateado not in 6/8, but in Afghani 7/8 time – a firework of dance perfection and syncopated rhythm which is fuelled by a first-class ensemble. The guitarists El Espina and Miguel Pérez deliver the musical elixir from which Castaño takes her vitality. Antonio Saavedra and Emilio Cabello sing and clap in accompaniment as if this were their last night on earth. Hakim Ludin presents his virtuosity and artistic diversity in an enchanting percussion solo which transports the audience into a world of mysterious sound images: On Kanjira, Cajon and other Oriental hand drums, Ludin enthrals with hypnotising sound and lyrical sound intricacies. With his fingers he flicks, beats and strokes the skin of the instrument and so creates atmospherically dense and meditative listening experiences with an extraordinarily elegant texture. His percussion dialog with Bettina Castaño was one of the highlights of the concert evening, which could hardly have been more intense and explosive. Ludin’s rapid finger technique and the impressive legwork by Bettina Castaño, who dances the flamenco in a typically earthbound way but with a floating buoyancy, together build a fascinating symbiosis of individual expressiveness and musical inventiveness.

Instead of concentrating solely on the traditional forms of flamenco, Castaño celebrates the dance as interplay with singers and guitars. The music of guitar (Toque) and song (Cante) rolls out the red carpet on which the dance itself develops. The husky voice of Antonio Saavedra lurks behind Castaño’s corporality, which is further emphasized by the costumes.

The dancer focuses emotions and transforms them into physical grace and rhythmic expressiveness. The result is neither dance nor music, but the expressive fusion of an elementary awareness of life. With two concerts, the festival director Klaus P. Becker bestowed on the audience a fiery-hot weekend. Pure luck that the stage survived.

• Flamenco puro • Flamenco brillante • Flamenco and gypsy-fiddles • Impulse of India • Flamenco and persian percussion • Flamencoriental • Cello:factory meets Bettina Castaño • hands & feet • Flamenco meets Appenzell • Bettina Castaño and carper quartet • El Amor Brujo and Zarzuelas with Sinfonieorchestra •