Indoor/Outdoor Flamenco

In September, if you were lucky, you saw Zorongo Flamenco’s Romeria at Minnehaha Falls. The outdoor performance, loosely based on Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca’s play Yerma, took viewers on a quest, a pilgrimage for fertility. But even if you didn’t see Romeria, make sure to catch this month’s Marchita at the Southern Theater, part two of Zorongo’s ambitious outdoor/indoor dance project.

Using video footage from Romeria, Marchita will complete the story of a barren wife. Like Romeria, Marchita reaches beyond to ask a deeper question: What happens when we forget our relationship with the earth? With its two-part structure, video and outdoor elements, and original score by Arcadio Marin, Romeria/Marchita is a groundbreaking work for Zorongo artistic director Susana di Palma. “It’s a whole different experience,” she says.

Romeria/Marchita offers a seemingly contradictory mix: a flamenco stage production that mixes site-specific video with literary sources to portray a contemporary environmental drama. But these aren’t necessarily contradictions at all. “Site-specific” is dance jargon and environmentalism seems like a new concern, but both are at the heart of flamenco. “Flamenco definitely came from the earth, from working on the farm,” says di Palma. The gypsies who created flamenco were migrant farm workers, and they often danced outside at night.

Some of the confusion may stem from recent rapid changes in flamenco itself. What began as the expressive dance release of semiliterate, marginalized people with hard lives is now a professional dance form practiced by educated, sophisticated artists all over the world. This means that today’s daring flamenco artists (di Palma among them) feel free to mix flamenco with just about anything.

But how do you keep the expressive force of a dance with origins in such deep sadness and suffering when you live a comfortable modern life? For di Palma, the answer is central to her artistry—and brings us back to the dark material of her current project. “As artists, we are servants for the soul,” she says. Whatever their own lives, artists must look closely at the world’s wrongs, because “art serves to guide us through that mystery.” In Romeria/Marchita, di Palma and her company tackle heavy and timely issues—and turn them into visceral yet beautiful dance. Oct. 16–19. Southern Theater, 1420 Washington Ave. S., Mpls., 612-340-1725