Audio transcript

Marina Tamayo (flamenco)

JOANNE KING: The dance team at the Arts Unit of the NSW Department of Education have produced this podcast as part of the 'Listen @ The Arts Unit' series. This podcast is produced on Gadigal and Cadigal land of the Eora nation. We pay our respect to the Traditional Custodians of the land with further acknowledgment of the many lands this podcast will be listened to across Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, storytelling, music and dance, along with the people, hold the memories of Australia's traditions, culture and hopes. Let us also acknowledge any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders and people in our presence today who guide us with their wisdom.

ANNOUNCER: The views expressed in the 'Listen @ The Arts Unit' podcast series are those of the interviewees and do not necessarily represent the views of the NSW Department of Education.

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Listen @ The Arts Unit.

JOANNE KING: Welcome and thank you for tuning in to this episode of 'Listen @ The Arts Unit'. My name is Joanne King and today we are joined by our guest, Marina Tamayo, a primary school educator and professional flamenco artist. Marina has a wealth of knowledge and performance experience, specifically in flamenco dance. I look forward to Marina sharing her knowledge of flamenco dance on this episode of 'Listen @ The Arts Unit'. Welcome, Marina.

MARINA TAMAYO: Hola.

JOANNE KING: Could you please share with the listeners your experience in the dance industry and how you progressed through your career?

MARINA TAMAYO: So I started my dance career in rural South Australia, on the river country. My family are migrants to Australia. And we started with all sorts of dance celebrations and cultural festivals and bringing just informal gatherings with dance and music and singing.

But at that time, cultural storytelling and cultural dance wasn't really a genre of dance in Australia. So I went to study ballet formally. And my mother was a great folk dancer, Spanish folk dancer. And she always believed that the ballet was the fundamentals of any grounding. If you want to dance and dance well, ballet would give you that tool, that licence, to go on.

So it was quite formative, the ballet training and went through ballet training and then my folk dancing on the side with the cultural clubs and festivals. And from ballet, probably up to about 13 years of age, when the body started changing and my discipline started changing, my mother was like, well, you're going to have to choose what you want to keep.

And I said, well, I want to keep my culture. I want to keep the Spanish. And she said to me, well, to learn flamenco right now in Australia is impossible because there isn't any masters of flamenco. So we'll have to go to Spain and you will have to stay with your grandmother, and you will have to learn flamenco from the gypsies because flamenco is gypsy. Flamenco isn't Spanish, so it's not taught in Spanish institutions at that time. So if you want to learn flamenco, we have to go to the gypsies. And it's going to be a little bit complicated because we have to contact some gypsies.

And I just thought that was the most exciting adventure. I was like, let's go find those gypsies. I'm ready for it. I mean, any 13- 14-year-old wants an adventure. And that sense of this is really for me, it's my thing. So that's what she did.

We packed up and went back to Abuela's in Granada. And the story of my grandmother and how she organised this flamenco class was hilarious because she speaks Andaluz. So I didn't understand anything she said because I spoke English and Spanglish-- and my mother's Spanglish. My mother spoke English with a heavy Spanish accent.

So neither my English was very good. Neither my Spanish was any good. It was all mixed. And then my abuela spoke Andaluz, which is a thick dialect. And so I literally had to spend most of my training in Granada with the gypsies, who also spoke a dialect of gypsy, Gitano, using a lot of sign language and body language.

But look, besides the language barrier, when I got to study with the gypsies, funny enough, the ballet training blew their minds. They hadn't seen a young dancer come in, particularly from outside of their circle, pull out a double pirouette. And then, of course, I've got the skin and the face of a Gitana, of someone from Sacromonte, where I was studying.

They were thrilled that they had this body that was able to become a different discourse to what they were giving. And they immediately went to my grandmother and said, we want her in our dance company. That's it. We want her to stay. We can use this. So this is where it all began.

JOANNE KING: How long were you there for?

MARINA TAMAYO: A year.

JOANNE KING: What an incredible experience that your mother gave you to engage more with your culture. And I think you've shown that appreciation to them, be able to bring that in for other students, which is just really special.

MARINA TAMAYO: Yes. Look, I think everybody wants to have that sense of place and that sense of belonging is fundamental for every human being, that sense of place and belonging, so that if we are able to look at our grandparents and our parents and hear their stories and see their world, we are part of that. We carry their world. And to then bring that into our existence, that has so much power.

Only just the other day, I was teaching and I explained that in cultural storytelling, we don't come as one. The power of our culture is that we come as 1,000. That's the sentiment when I teach, is that you're not telling the story of one person. You're telling the story of 1,000.

So the power that you have, the power of your voice that you have, is 1,000 times greater. So it's not a solo form. Cultural storytelling is not a solo form. We're not distinctive by, this is what I want to say. We're conduits to what the voices have asked us to continue with.

JOANNE KING: So based on what you've said, what is it that drives your passion for flamenco dance, still to this day, in teaching and in performance?

MARINA TAMAYO: What drives my teaching is understanding that there is a intrinsic voice in every single student that has magic in it and they have this maximum potential to achieve their success, whether it's in the classroom or whether it's in the dance studio, to see that potential and to take the student towards that path so that they can they can find it because we all have that.

And had I not had people believe in my potential and what they could see, even if I couldn't see it, they gave me that path and that support to get there. I had a lot of stories to tell from being brought up on the river. There was a lot of cultural segregation in the river country, whether it be based on race or colour or language barriers and seeing my parents struggle with that and not having money and not having opportunities like someone else might have had it.

But that didn't stop my parents from instilling that fight inside, that intrinsic fight of you can be someone and something with your voice, with your art, with what contribution you give to society. And so that was my instrument to get out of that situation that we were in. And so the inspiration I like to give students in performance is that space where they feel that success and that achievement.

JOANNE KING: For many of our listeners, flamenco dance may be unfamiliar. Can you share a little bit of the history of flamenco dance and some of the specific characteristics that identify flamenco dance from other dance styles?

MARINA TAMAYO: Well, I think that the flamenco storytelling has parallel lines of content with all stories. And that is, we tell stories of love, loss, family, events. We tell stories of hope, injustices, despair, loneliness-- all the sentiments of a human and everything that we have value on in our society.

And being that it's a gypsy form, they were often-- well, they were displaced. A gypsy culture is displaced. They don't have a land that they call their own and they were always marginalised. So that's why I think flamenco touches a lot of people. And it resonates because it works on the human spirit. It's the adversity that they face and how they overcome that adversity, whether it's through personal loss, also the triumphs.

It's not always that dark cloud. There's these triumphs that the human spirit can celebrate together. And so it's really about the strength of the human spirit, really, flamenco storytelling. And it brings a lot of people connected to it. That's why people often are lifted or inspired by it. And they seek deep into it because it has something that touches every single person's story at some point in their life.

And, of course, you've also got the theatrical side of flamenco. There's costuming and there's lighting and then there's this music that carries as another voice. And it's quite mesmerising. So it has something for everyone, wherever you want to see it.

JOANNE KING: It has that element of percussion, body percussion as well.

MARINA TAMAYO: Absolutely. Look, body percussion is massive because before the guitar, flamenco was only percussive because the guitar is actually a Spanish introduction. And the gypsies came from the Indian path. The Rajasthanis came. Then they came through the African routes. There's also some Caribbean routes in it. There's Celtic routes in it. And there's Jewish. There's Moorish. There's Christian.

It's a world music genre. And when it landed in the Iberian Peninsula of Southern Spain, it was promoted more because people were reading about it. And I think it was Irving Washington wrote the 'Tales of the Alhambra' for example-- this is a fantastic book for literature, by the way-- and he talked about what he had seen.

And he had seen these gypsies and hearing gypsies singing and wailing and being possessed by this greater spirit. And once he wrote about it, a lot of English writers started coming to Granada to witness this phenomena that it looked like these dancers were being possessed and same with these singers.

This possession that they were talking about was a human spirit, or human condition, called duende. And duende is when the spirit takes over your performance. Some people talk about, in Western terms, it's like when you get into the flow. But this had more of a spiritual context, where they were seemed to be more possessed with other voices coming and delivering something with an out-of-body experience, where there's no structure of particular dance step, but it becomes a dance step because of that elevation spiritually.

So really, flamenco, in sense of a genre, has become a multi-cultural, multi-modal. And it only became non-percussive when the Spanish said, hey, we could use this. And of course when Spanish guitars became accessible, women actually, the female gypsies, became the guitarists, also the singers.

And so, yeah, the percussion, again, it could be played with palmas, which is hand clapping and there's various different types of hand clapping. OK, so you have the bass, which is a really-- [low clapping] And then you have the treble-- [high clapping]

So all these different sounds in flamenco, the bass and the treble, are really important when the singer sings and what part the singer sings and what part the dancer dances. And so you can't make a loud sound over the singer and then when the soft sound is with the footwork. So it's all very complementary.

The same with the footwork, the very beginning gypsies-- right at the beginning, the gypsies didn't have shoes. So the footwork wasn't really that pronounced. It was more with the clapping and more with the singing. But in time, as everything evolved and the guitars came in and the influence of the Celts-- when the gypsies from the North saw the Celts up in the North because the Celts were living in the North and so were the gypsies. But it was too cold there for the gypsies. The gypsies preferred the warmer weather, so they stayed more down to the South. But they went North because the work was up there for the fisheries.

But in the North, they were doing a lot of Celtic dancing because that was where the Celts were with the last empire. So when they saw all this footwork going on and they went down and they put these shoes on and it was quite percussive. Now, the gypsies had the Rajasthani footwork, which is the style called Kathak.

So you have this fusion of Kathak and Celts. You've got shoes. And you've got the shuffle on, the lovely jigs and the jumps that the Celts do. Then you've got the Rajasthanis that have this footwork with bells on their feet and they've got henna on the base of their feet. And they make these intricate footwork and they do it in these counts of 10.

So now all of a sudden, what comes from that-- over obviously hundreds of years-- is you've got this thing called flamenco. It's Arabic. It's Celtic. It's Moorish. And it's this fusion of percussion, heavy percussion, because that's the roots, the African roots as well, the Cuban roots as well, all that percussion beats.

So now we've got 3/4, 4/4, 6/8 9/8 12/8, and now we're counting in twelves and tens. So this is how it's evolved. Flamenco has evolved from a world music, world traveling. So whether you like the beat of a rumba [rhythmic clapping], or tango [rhythmic clapping], or you've got something very ancient called Sigiriya, which is like the Rajasthans, which is in fives. [slower rhythmic clapping]

And then you've got the Moorish, which is in twelves [faster rhythmic clapping]

So all this percussion can be explored through music, dance, feet, hands, drums, you name it. It's endless.

JOANNE KING: That's wonderful. Thank you so much for that insight. That's really great. I think there's more to learn than purely what we can cover in this podcast.

MARINA TAMAYO: Yeah, clearly, clearly. Look, it is. It's massive. The word flamenco just goes exponentially across the world. So, yeah.

JOANNE KING: So based on what you've just told us around the time signatures and the history of the flamenco dance, as a student who would come and learn flamenco dance alongside the other more traditional styles of classical or the commercial styles of dance, what changes and what challenges do you see in those students that come to you to learn?

MARINA TAMAYO: The first thing that I always say when a student says to me, I've been dancing for 20 years and I'm a professional classical ballerina and so can I do advanced flamenco? And I always sit back and I say, you're learning a new language, so give yourself time to learn it. It doesn't matter what background, doesn't matter how long you've been a master in your genre.

Be prepared to sit back and learn the basics because flamenco has its technique for dance. It has its technique to be accompanied by music. It has its technique and theory to be accompanied by el cante, which is the singing. And it has its literature you have to understand. And it also has the language you have to understand.

Much like ballet, you have to understand the French. Well in flamenco, you have to understand the Spanish. Once we've learned the discourse, then you have to drill that to become fluent. And that fluidity is like your phonics classes. You have to know how to blend every single phonic and know how to put it together to make words. And it's the same as in dance. You have to blend those movements to create a phrase in movement that you can't see one movement going into the next.

However, in saying that, every challenge for every age group, for every background, is the same when it comes to interpretation. With flamenco, it is the human condition. It is based on human stories. It's your story. And unless you're prepared to go to the story that you want to tell, then the movement only becomes movement and the flamenco doesn't come.

The flamenco arises when the student or the artist or the dancer takes it to the next level. And so it doesn't matter if you're 5 or 50. Every human condition is valid. If you want to talk about your triumphs, if you want to talk about a certain event, if you want to be vulnerable with your storytelling and start improvising, that's where the flamenco starts.

The flamenco starts with that vulnerability, with that story, with that condition. So that, to me, is really something that always challenges the student because not everybody wants to go there. Not everybody wants to go there. There are many dancers that just want to dance. They're like, look, I don't want to go there. I don't want to go with my story. I don't need-- or they don't feel that they have that need.

They would like to stay as chorus. Can I just be in chorus line? I don't mind. And that's great. But then that's more Spanish dance. The flamenco comes in with that human condition. That's where that duende is.

JOANNE KING: So telling your story through the flamenco dance, do you have then room to improvise new movement? Or are there purely set movements that you need to do but you can perform them in a separate order to express that story?

MARINA TAMAYO: Pure flamenco is 100% improvisation, pure flamenco. Commercialised. flamenco has been structured. And it's been structured because, well, the conditions have changed. It's now in the theatre. However, you'll still see master flamenco artists will go into an improvised moment, much like that jazz band.

The jazz band will play some favourite songs and then there will be a set in between that jazz band and it will just go off into an improvised set. And everyone just goes, wow. And you'll see the drummer going off. You see the guitarist going off. It's the same thing with the flamenco group is that there will be moments where the guitarist will be able to go and improvise, the percussionist and then the dancer improvises. So that's the beauty of pure flamenco.

When you're learning flamenco now and we're talking 2024, we give the education of all the steps that you need to know to get yourself in and out of improvisation. You need to know where you are and how you communicate. There are steps that communicate to the guitarist to let the guitarist know you're coming out of that step to change into another. There are speed changing steps. There are direction changing steps. There are steps that changes the rhythm for-- and it's signals to tell the musicians because the musicians, whilst the dancer is dancing, follow you.

And then you need to know the rules that when the singer kicks in, you follow the singer. So the singer rules. So then everyone shifts their focus to the singer. The singer, who's the storyteller, will tell the story literally and talk about his Prima Juana, who goes to the shop and fell in love and then never saw her love again. And then you convey that in your dance. The music follows. We teach that.

That's what we teach. And then you practise that and practise that and practise that. And then at some point in your career-- and it could be 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, it's all individual-- the penny drops. And the amount of time you've dedicated yourself to that craft and the fluidity you have in those movements and that storytelling and the practice, then you begin that improvisation process.

JOANNE KING: One last question. We haven't really touched on your professional performing career, but you've got a lot of experience in the industry. What's a piece of advice that you could give for dancers wanting to use their love of dance, in whatever genre that may be, to further their career as either an educator or performer?

MARINA TAMAYO: My advice would be to upskill, continue studying, continue being in the education system, whether it be studying your performance art or your historical art or specialise. I think specialisation is important. If you can specialise in what you're doing, be a specialist in it and continue educating yourself. Don't stop educating yourself. No matter where you are in your path right now, think about how you can upskill.

And you never get there. That's the one thing I want to remind everyone. You don't. When you say, I want to get there and it's like, well, there is just the peak that you can't see the other peak because it just is a continual journey in studying. Study your craft and also study around your craft because the broader the depth of knowledge you have, then the greater understanding you have in what you're doing and how it affects everything else.

JOANNE KING: Well, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today, Marina. It's been insightful sharing this time with you and learning more about flamenco dance. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of 'Listen @ The Arts Unit' as part of the 'Cultural dance' series.

MARINA TAMAYO: Thank you for having me.

ANNOUNCER: For more information on our programs, explore our website at artsunit.nsw.edu.au. Music licensed by Envato Elements. Copyright, State of NSW (Department of Education), 2024.