I really love Flamenco, For So Many Reasons

Hi, my name is AJ. I’ve been dancing Flamenco for almost 4 years now. I really love Flamenco, for so many reasons. A big part of it for me is that it’s really healing. I’m a person who lives with a lot of trauma and emotion that’s been locked in my body for a really long time.

Flamenco really allows me to connect with the earth. To utilize the emotion I feel, the grief, the anger, and the immense passion. It allows me to release them in a really safe, creative, empowering, and revitalizing way. I always think of when I’m dancing Flamenco, I’m dancing like a cork screw, screwing down into the earth, and releasing up into the sky.

For me it’s so powerful to come to a dance as an adult, and to be able to bring my full self. In all of the facets, in my emotional life, through my performance ability, and using the immense emotion and energy that I’ve really locked down for a long time.

As someone who’s danced many different types of dance as a young person, it’s so empowering to be able come to Flamenco as an adult, and really choose and be specific about why I’m choosing to engage in this art form. Especially as a person who isn’t Spanish, who isn’t gitano, who isn’t from Andalucia, but who’s doing this beautiful form, dancing this dance on a land that isn’t even my own, that’s stolen land.

So as a person who comes from ancestry that is mestizo, which means indigenous latin american and spaniard, my family is from various regions of South America. It’s really interesting to navigate a dance that is a completely foreign culture from my own. And dancing on this land, being able to heal and connect with parts of me that have been repressed for a really long time in a way that I would never have expected.

I’m really grateful to Flamenco, and all of the teachers I work with, all of the dancers I get to learn from, the artists I get to learn from. I’m able to continue to and choose to, be allowed to bring all of my full self in a way that I never experienced as a young person.

For better of for worse, Flamenco, really gives me freedom to channel of that energy with me. To heal, to feel creative and empowered to express all of who I am.