Trials & Tribulations of a Flamenco Dancer – Part 1

By Michelle Harding
August 28, 2007

Michelle’s professional Bulerias in Cafe de Chinitas, Oct 2006 – Photo by: Elvira Yebes

This special edition is by Michelle Harding, beloved AMFDA student and Mozaico Flamenco company dancer for the past 2 seasons.  Oscar and I take special pride in her because she is La Gitana…but she calls herself La Jamonera (inside joke).  People may know Michelle as the Seguiriya girl that knocked us out at El Jaleo.

Here’s her story:

I started flamenco at a disadvantage.  I thought it would be easy.

I had been to the Kino Cafe.  I had been moved.  I remember watching Karen Boothroyd dance one night and I saw the sweat in her hair and the joy in her eyes and I thought “I can do that.  I want to do that”.  I thought that in a couple of years, I too could be dancing flamenco on stage with passion and heart.  I thought the floreo would probably be the hardest part.

Now I’ve been a student of flamenco for more than six years and I know there is nothing easy about this arte.  But there’s lots of joy and immeasurable rewards.  This is one piece of my flamenco journey.

The most important lesson I’ve learned is that the process of learning flamenco is not linear.  Rather, it is organic.  It comes in waves and cycles with very long, insanely frustrating periods that feel like stagnation or, worse, regression.  I thought learning to dance flamenco would all add up like a tidy mathematical equation.  Master skill number one, master skill number two, three and four and it would all equal sudden, magnificent proficiency.   I was so wrong.

Here’s what it’s really like.

Imagine: I’ve been taking lessons for about three years. I feel pretty good. Every now and then I catch myself busting a move that could be called flamenco-esque. Now it’s time to learn how to do palmas.

Okay. I’ve got good rhythm. I understand the compas. I cannot, however, for love or money, get my hands to make a high palmas sound. I can’t do altas. Kasandra tries to help. She shows me how to make the air pocket: three fingers go here, you find the pocket and a nice cracking-sharp sound happens. She even claps my hand with her own to show me that it’s possible. I can’t blame it on some freak physiological deficit.

I stand there in class for weeks, slapping my hands together in every conceivable way. All I can manage to produce is some muffled ineffectual flapping and a stream of profanity that would make a sailor blush. I sweat about it. My blood pressure goes through the roof. The tears well up. I grit my teeth and persevere. Weeks of this go by before I finally crack. Full-on meltdown. “I’ll never be able to do this!” I scream in despair at poor Andrew. “I can’t even clap my hands. I’m the biggest loser! This is hubris! This is punishment for thinking I could ever do anything right! I’m quitting! I can’t believe I can’t even clap my frigging hands!” Storm out in a tearful rage, stage right.

Then everything started to suffer. I lost confidence in my ability to learn anything. Every time I looked at myself in the mirror, I cringed at the ugliness of every move I made. I was going down. Way, way down. Not just down, but backwards. Everything in my entire life was awful because I couldn’t clap my god-forsaken hands.

Something must have happened, though, because now I can clap my hands and I don’t even have to think about it! I don’t know when the breakthrough happened, but eventually palmas became a non-issue. In fact, I really like playing palmas. A lot. Now I get complaints that my altas are too loud and I’m endangering peoples’ long-term hearing. Somehow the learning happened, but not as a result of my frustrated dramatics and impatience. It actually happened in spite of it.

I have replayed this tired old scenario with every imaginable aspect of flamenco. There have been times when I was never going to be able to

move my arms,
not move my shoulders,
not look like a wet noodle,
do footwork,
do floreo,
invent anything,
do anything, ever.

So this is lesson number one. It ain’t ever going to be neat and tidy, automatic or easy. It’s a trajectory all right, but it’s not an A to B sort of thing. Learning flamenco is a meandering, mucky, frustrating journey with only half a map. The road doubles back on itself all over the place, but it can lead us to the most unexpected, beautiful places. It forces us to face ourselves, go beyond our fragile little egos and get over our ideas about how things “should” be.

Ah, Flamenco, the art form that makes even clapping our hands a challenge. I still can’t snap my fingers, though.