flamenco

Flamenco's etymology is one of the most disputed in all of dance history, and the debate reveals how deeply political the question of origin can be. The word flamenco in ordinary Spanish means 'Flemish' — a person from Flanders (present-day Belgium and the Netherlands). Flanders was part of the Habsburg Empire, which also ruled Spain, and Flemish courtiers were prominent and often resented in the Spanish court of Charles I (Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) in the sixteenth century. Spanish commoners reportedly used 'flamenco' as a term for the arrogant, flamboyant behavior they associated with the Flemish courtiers: strutting, showy, colorful. From this usage, some etymologists argue, the word shifted to describe the showy, passionate, flamboyant style of music and dance that would later be called flamenco.

The competing theories are numerous. One holds that flamenco derives from the Arabic felag mangu, meaning 'fugitive peasant' — a term for the Moorish inhabitants who remained in Andalusia after the Reconquista and who, forced underground, preserved their music in secret. This theory is romantic and plausible but lacks documentary support. Another connects the word to the flamingo (flamenco in Spanish), the long-necked, dramatically posed bird that was associated with the Andalusian landscape; the dancer's posture — arms raised, head tilted, body arched — does resemble the bird's characteristic stance. A third connects it to the Romani people (historically called Gitanos in Spain), who were crucial to flamenco's development and who in southern Spain were sometimes called flamencos — possibly because their dark complexion and foreign origin associated them, in the Spanish imagination, with the exotic elsewhere, whether Flemish or Moorish.

What is not disputed is that flamenco as a recognizable art form emerged in Andalusia — particularly in the provinces of Seville, Cádiz, and Jerez — sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It was a synthesis of multiple traditions: the music of the Romani who had migrated to Spain from northern India via Persia and the Middle East, the Moorish musical legacy that remained in Andalusia after the Reconquista, the liturgical song traditions of Sephardic Jews, and the folk traditions of the indigenous Andalusian population. The result was something entirely new: cante jondo (deep song), the guitar as both rhythmic and melodic instrument, zapateado (footwork), and the particular vocabulary of hand and arm movements that distinguishes flamenco from all other forms of dance.

The flamenco's formalization as a performance art occurred in the cafés cantantes — entertainment venues in Seville and other Andalusian cities — in the late nineteenth century. Here, flamenco moved from private celebration and street performance into a stage context, where it was watched rather than participated in. This transition created the flamenco we know: a virtuosic solo form in which the cantaor (singer), bailaora (female dancer) or bailaor (male dancer), and tocaor (guitarist) each contribute to a structure of improvisation and response. Federico García Lorca, the great Andalusian poet, wrote passionately about the cante jondo's quality of duende — an untranslatable quality of raw, mortal authenticity, the sense that the performer is in genuine communication with something beyond the technical. Flamenco was declared UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010.