It seems hard to believe and yet it happened: on Saturday, June 24, under the auspices of the Fifth edition of the Meetings JTI, The Great Palace Hall, with all its 3000 seats, was narrow for all the people who came to see the celebrated flamenco dancer Joaquin Cortes, dancing for the first time in Romania "Mi Soledad" ("'My Loneliness"), his latest creation. The flamenco dance represents a gypsy or calo ritual form of song and dance, met in the Spanish Southern regions. The flamenco dance must be distinguished from the Spanish classical dance ( esculela bolera), as well as from the regional popular dances, as jota in Aragon or the sevillas in Andalusia. It's danced with the body, it's sung with the voice, accompanied at the guitar by the gypsies at their weddings, baptisms, festivals and parties, both out of joy and as an expression of pain. The flamenco dance represents the oral-historical media through which the gypsies communicate, throughout the time, their lives, their thoughts, their feelings as well as their dancing talent. The most powerful element of the dance performance is the moment of trance (duende), epi-phenomenal moment. The performer slides mentally in a liminal state of conscience, by repeating obsessively the same movement sequence: the feet and the soles attack the floor with a striking beat, stacatto with the [Tequency of a machinegun( zapateado). The attention is focused inside; his lips vibrate as if they were resonating in the beat rhythm or in the heart pulse, the perspiration starts to trickle down fTom his cheeks to his neck, the dancer keeps dancing without feeling the fatigue or the tenseness of his body, of his feet or soles. Some gypsies believe that a spiritual presence creeps into their dance and that, in that particular instance they find themselves "into the flamenco". The poet Federico Garcia Lorca named this moment " the time when the dark sounds enter the dancer's body". The distinction between this world and the next and between mortality and death are united into the performer's body according as he (or she) becomes totally engulfed in the rhythm ( compass). The show "Mi Soledad" ("My Loneliness") created by Joaquin Cortes and thought out by him as a confession, similarly to the reading of an intimate journal, leans on a simple construction which intercalates the flamenco dance with gypsy songs. The original music of the show is composed by Joaquin Cortes himself together with Jose Carbonell and Antonio Carbonell, receiving powerful influences from jazz, Cuban music and even classical music, the lyrics being signed by Antonio Carbonell and Arturo Jose Carbonell and performed by feminine voices: Chelo Pantoja, "Genara", Saray; masculine voices: Antonio Carbonell, Juan Jose Amador, "Juanares", Enrique Heredia; violin: Angel Lopez Rodas; guitar: Jose Carbonell, El "Piripi"; flute: Juan Ferandez Galvez, "Parilla"; accordion: Juan Pedro Cornejo 0 Cuco Perez; cello: Sasha Fielding; bass: Arian Suarez; percussion Vicente Suere, "Morita", Fernando Favier, Rafael SeITano Caldera, "Agapula". The scene space, in the absence of any decor element, is confined by a suggestive game of Jights, specially created to punctuate the passing through various emotional states.The specific gypsy costumes are balanced in line and color by the renowned French designer Jean Paul Gaultier. But what brings together all the elements which compose this show, in a disturbing development of rhythm, music and color, succeeding to overcome all the barriers established by custom, habits and cultural-religious traditions, is the personality of Joaquin Cortes "A dancer with an absolutely fascinating charisma, inasmuch as he hypnotizes the audience with his zapateados. It is certain that the flamenco dance promoted by Joaquin Cortes strays from the pure style of the genre, however, because of him, the entire world loves at present this dance and not only that, the culture, the habits and the traditions of the nomad gypsies, through his wonderful art begin to be accepted and appreciated.

by Simona Somacescu

by Simona Somacescu

Editor's note: Simona Somacescu is one of the best known Romanian ballet soloists from the past two decades, with an important international career. As we have informed before, the new manager of the State Opera, as following this week's management selection organised by tbe Ministry of Culture, is script writer Catalin Ionescu-Arbore.

by Simona Somacescu

After almost 30 years, under the patronage of "ITI Meetings", the prodigious company Cullberg Ballet is coming back to Romania, in order to give two performances on the stage of the National Theatre of Bucharest. The performance, presented in a formula, reunites new choreographic works, by Johan Inger and Mats Ek. Johan Inger with his "Empty House", for which he designed the choreography and the sets, and Mylla Ek the costumes, develops a choreographic string architecturally built on music themes of the Hungarian folklore, mastered by Felix Lajko. Throughout the show, the plot of his choreographic creation is carried out on two levels, by means of a set element - the curtain - which divides the scene, thus determining a relation between them, of complementarity or total independence. The end of the work balances the construction by returning to a one level choreographic exposure. In "ALUMINIUM", choreographer Mats Ek, inspired by John Adams' music, Shaker Loops (in colaboration with G. Schirmer), with sets and costumes created by Peder Freiij, starts a topic over the existence of the couple - a social value that belongs to the Christian culture - in an age which is developing an egocentrism taken to the extreme, by comparing it with a subjective reference point. During the choreographic material, the set elements (tables, lamps, spoons, forks, knifes and plates, all from aluminum) lose their useful meaning, in order to become reference points with an active semantic content, thus determining a plastic representation of a newly created relation. The third choreographic work, "NEGRO CON FLORES", for which Johan Inger creates the choreography, the settings and the costumes, approches a topic less treated in choreographic performances, that is the psychoanalysis of the human unconscious, on music composed by (for Culiberg Ballet) Stefan Levin. Through a TV set, on the left of the stage, on which the public can watch a black and white movie with the faces of the sleeping dancers, the choreographer connects the audience right to the residual affective material of the human unconscious, which is choreographically objectively created on the stage. The return to the conscious level coincides with the transformation of the black and white images into color pictures.