Miguel Marin is the indefatigable founder and still head honcho of the Flamenco Festival brand, which he started in New York City in 2001 and has now exceeded 1,250 performances around the globe. When he took to the stage to introduce Manuel Liñan’s show, comedically staring up at a microphone level with the crown of his head, it was in terms that initially made me wonder whether it was reviewable. Amor Amado Amén (“Love Beloved Amen”) was, Marin revealed, a “sharing”, rather than a fully-fledged work. In a post-show discussion, Liñan said that the idea of a show about love and desire had been on his mind for two years, but the detail had only been developed in an artistic residency at Sadler’s Wells over the five preceding days since he had arrived in London.
My reservations about reviewing a “sharing” were unfounded since the resultant 45-minute work, integrating most of the usual ingredients of flamenco with spoken word, was much more rounded and slicker than any work in progress. It was a collaboration with two musicians – guitarist, Francisco Vinuesa and one-man-band, Sabio Janiak (who is apparently able to play more than 150 instruments) – and Ivan Bavčević, a Croatian Reiki Master who is founder and director of the Consciousness Center. Bavčević’s website proclaims on the homepage: Expressing Love is the Only Real Mission, a statement that could have been the subtext to a work that was like being enveloped by a huge hug, or as Liñan would say “un gran abrazo”.
Now aged 43, Liñan remains a mighty, macho, charismatic bailaor as evidenced here in an impressive closing conversation with Vinuesa and his guitar. However, his powerful, even sometimes pugnacious, zapateado (footwork) seamlessly transitioned into much gentler expressions of tenderness, a cipher for a dancer who has explored previously untapped aspects of queer flamenco. It started by performing with the familiar trappings of the bailaora, such as the mantóns (elaborate fringed shawls) and the batas de cola (dresses with long trains that need to be carefully manipulated by the dancer). These regular sequences in his traditional shows reached an apotheosis with Viva!, a production in which Liñan and six other male dancers performed as bailaoras. This highlight of last year’s Flamenco Festival caused Liñan to be nominated for both an Olivier and a National Dance Award in 2022.
Amor Amado Amén continues Liñan’s thematic focus on queer flamenco, now with a lens firmly on same sex love, a subject that was taboo almost everywhere during Liñan’s youth but nowhere more so than in Spain gradually releasing itself from Franco’s grip. The young dancer made flamenco his career by hiding his true self but now his sexuality is unleashed with an emotional sincerity that underscores everything that he does, not least in this dramatic and episodic performance.
A dimly lit opening gradually revealed Liñan buttoned-up within the raincoat worn by Bavčević, with just his head peeping out from the much taller man’s chest, immediately emphasising the work’s essential intimacy. Liñan embellished his early explosive dance movement by using his amplified breath as a percussive instrument. Bavčević read poetry with repetitive phrases, sometimes spoken into the microphone, sometimes half heard in the distance: “Only Desire Keeps Me Alive” was one; “Your Mouth On My Mouth”, another, this latter given physical reference not by an actual meeting of lips but by the two microphones placed in cartoonish kissing mode (a tad too literal for my liking). The spoken words intensified the work’s sensual eroticism, but this was a sequence that could have been reduced to give more attention to the electric coordination of music and dance.
In addition to being a pure flamenco artist, deeply rooted in the traditions of the art, Liñan is also a thoughtful, innovative, entrepreneurial director of flamenco. In addition to this artistic residency and subsequent “sharing” he also choreographed the Yeli Yeli section of Mercedes de Córdoba’s Si, quiero, performed on the following day, and he directed and performed in the Gala Flamenca that closed this year’s Festival, a workload that makes it even more surprising that he was able to craft this fascinating show in just five days! Made and performed in July, it will have another life, but still referenced as “Dance in Progress”, when shown at the Centre Pompidou in Málaga on 19 July.
