Flamenco Festival

Signs and Wonders

"In the silent pools of the night we learn how life is illuminated by light, but intensified by darkness. So, too, if we darken our eyes to take in the world around us through smell, touch and sound, rather than appearance, shape or colour, we may hear our true feelings and unlock a gateway leading to new creative paths. Then, by exploring who we have been, who we are and who we hope we may be, we come upon signs and wonders which illuminate our lives."
Eva Yerbabuena

With Signs and Wonders, Eva Yerbabuena reprises and refreshes some of the outstanding flamenco choreographies performed by her company since its debut in 1998.

Yerbabuena, a native of Granada, has received numerous awards, including Spain's National Dance Prize. With this show, an innovative spectacle of authentic flamenco, the young dancer and choreographer has retraced her steps, and from her current perspective has reinvented dances extracted from five previous shows, including "…Eva" (1998), "5 women 5" (2000) and "Spindle of Memory" (2006). New choreography is also included in Signs and Wonders 90 minutes.

Live musicians performing diverse flamenco styles accompany the Ballet Flamenco Eva Yerbabuena

Yerbabuena

Genuine, strong, sensitive music in three cantaores who strike inside the bailaora with their voices and who help her to draw out very unlike feelings from within. Cante, Dance, Guitar in a pure and unyielding way.

“The light dies down, the sound fades, the shapes vanish and I remain alone, dizzy amidst shadows, with the well-founded knowledge from my insides of flamenco’s temporality”.

Eva Yerbabuena

Lluvia (Rain)

Lluvia (Rain) is born on a gray day of pure melancholy. I want to explore my beginnings, perhaps making everyone who believes they know me (because it’s very easy to define the person you are facing and not yourself) to feel a little uncomfortable.

My origins are love in the purest solitude. By this I mean that I don’t believe in wonderful love, but rather that which makes you get to know parts of your essence that you didn’t even know existed, parts of your essence which you discover through the pain caused by that form of purity we call coldness (melancholy). This is not a complaint, because I’m sure that suffering is a step towards success, although success isn’t what matters the most to me at this moment, although success isn’t what has mattered the most to me at any other instant.

In short, this show is a tribute to melancholy and coldness, to being alive, to the endlessness of life. To that end, nothing better than the inner voice of a guitar, alone, with a guitar theme which is layout, crux and ending, and starting from which three voices will develop cantes from other eras, such as Murciana, Levantica, Taranto, Taranta, Milonga, Tanguillos, Romeras, Soleá and Cuplés, which I’ve needed to choreograph for some time now.

Because at times I should have shut up and I didn’t. Because at times I wouldn’t have minded being a non-listener and being able to check out that which I have never believed in. Because at times there is an invitation which powerfully drags me towards that door where imagination dwells.

Eva Yerbabuena

Four Voices

“Only when our allotted time is finally running out does its meaning and possible importance reveals itself. Knowing we have the chance to leave behind and inevitable mark ,ay be decisive for us to continue believing.

Art is the possibility of creation which endures forever. We draw inspiration from the surety of knowing we are surrounded by such strength. It help us to commit to ourselves and to the search for perfection.
While it is easy to judge others, we find difficult to be judge by ourselves. I return to four principles: strength, perfection, inspiration and commitment. That is also how I see these four poets and their work, which has provoked this performance. For them I will make my greatest effort that the judgments passed on this show recognize the spirit of their work. “They are as much yours as mine”.

I will always feel Grateful to those who endure, and those who plant the seed of the possibility of enduring”.

Eva Yerbabuena

(…)"Eva"

“I am alone, in silence. Music plays on a crackling gramophone. It tells me that flamenco – its voices, sounds, instruments and movements- is a supreme expression of feeling, without rules or limits and that it has long been so. Travelling in time, I move towards an awareness of something in which I have long believed: flamenco’s timelessness.

I feel flamenco’s different song-forms within me - they fill my body, not only with their name and form but also with freedom.

Bulerías entitled ‘Rarapata’- kicked and stamped, incide me when I was born....

A granaína entitled ‘Torre de la Vela’, free and arhythmic, in which the ruffled train of a dress carries memories of Granada: the light framed by its skylights, its green aromas, its plasterwork – sacred to the touch, gentle tinkling of water, ceaselessly trickling and dripping...

A seguirilla, the essence of purity...

A soleá, from Triana, from its bridge...

The flamenco voice drops away and ‘Tiempo al Tiempo’ starts: verbless dance, hard blows ...

‘Chirrín-malacatín’, a popular Seville expression, tells us that something is drawing to a close- and it does so in tangos which rebel against convention, like a flame that settting my body in motion ...

The light dies, the sound fades, the shapes disappear and I find myself alone, dizzy in shadowy darkness, with a new and different knowledge ... the realisation that flamenco is not just voices, music, movement, it is also the courage to leave one’s heart open to what life brings…

Eva Yerbabuena

Spindle of memory

The silkworms will spin all those memories that I have had no time to live. From fine silk they will leave embroideries on the shoulder of whoever recognizes his or her past.

I do not know who or what governs our existence, but, having posed myself that question, I realise that I need to pause to be able to live in the here and now; that I need to turn my memory towards a past future in which I can discover who I am and what my memory serves for. I do not mean that my breathing will pause. Rather, through flamenco, I would like to feel that it is not only through my nose and my mouth that I breathe. And rather than write a synopsis that tries to sum up difficult intangibles, I will create a new performance with the greater surety that my feelings seem better understood when they translate flamenco’s cante – whether a Soleá, or Seguiriya or Mirabrás - into dance. So, simply, I will allow myself to be carried along by the small things that I protect with so much love, and in that process all those who know me (not only as a dancer) will become participants, for they have shared in shaping the values that others, unknown to me, recognize in my work.

Eva Yerbabuena