Freedom's Dance

"Flamenco is not just a style of music. There is a philosophy behind flamenco,” says Rebeca Sanchez Gallego.

According to this philosophy the three core requirements to live a “good” life are freedom, health and sharing.

This is the basis of a performance developed by Rebeca that will be brought to the Town Hall Arts Centre in the coming weeks. Her talents as a singer and dancer have seen her grace the stage of the National Concert Hall in Dublin accompanied by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Conducted by fellow Spaniard, Jaime Martín, the entire event was broadcast live on Lyric FM.

“If you miss one of these three things: your freedom, your health or your sharing - that’s when your life could be completely destroyed very easily,” asserts Rebeca.

She recalls the collective trauma of Lockdown when these three limbs of the flamenco philosophy were thrown out of step.

“All of us, we lost our freedom and people decided to make up crazy things and paranoia. A lot of people lost their health and a lot of people lost the ability to share. And what happened with all of us? Everyone was destroyed in many different ways, because these are the three legs to be settled in this earth,” she says with a stamp of her heel on the floor as if to confirm we are on this earth.

We are chatting upstairs in the Town Hall Arts Centre Cavan and rain is teeming down on the grey streets outside. Rebeca’s wrapped up in an enormous woollen jumper a far cry from the traditional red dress in which she performs, and yet somehow her confident, upright posture sings out she’s an accomplished dancer.

Asked what on earth she’s doing in this saturated isle when she could be in her sun-drenched homeland of Seville, she says she is asked this a lot.Having moved first to Dublin without any English, she fell in love with Ireland. A recommendation from a Breffni colleague persuaded her to relocate to Cavan.

It offers everything Rebeca and her family could want: enough space to keep a horse, and a place to continue her caring work with “my grannies” in a nursing home. She credits reading to her grannies after work for helping to learn English.

“Because I live in Cavan, I would love to develop my work in Cavan and also to show all the talent we have here,” she says.

The talent for this show include violinist Rafal Szydlowski, Alan Darcy on percussion, dancers Aysha Treanor and Caitlin Gear, and Odhran O’Brien on sound. Guitar is the core instrument of flamenco and remarkably, Rebeca met her guitarist, Caleb Byrne while giving a workshop in Breifne College.

“One of the teachers said, ‘I would like to introduce you to one of the students - he likes flamenco’,” she recalls before getting the “biggest surprise” of meeting Caleb.

“He said, ‘I can play something for tangos’ - he started playing and I was just flipping out!

“He learned in the same way that the old flamenco people learned - by ear. That’s amazing because it’s extremely difficult when you don’t have flamenco music surround you.”

Flamenco’s rich heritage will be explored in Rebeca’s show through the works of Spain’s great writer - Federico García Lorca. The poet was murdered during the Civil War. A pianist of note, Lorca made recordings of his own compositions, but also traditional songs. One such recording, Rebeca credits for rescuing a style of flamenco which was on the brink of disappearing.

In her home province of Andulcia the Arab heritage of the area is still visible, in the architecture, the food, and especially in their music.

“For 800 years we were Arabic. Our song, our rhythms, our movements come from all this Arabic society.”

Under the ‘Reconquista’ of the 13th Century, successive Castillian rulers sought to extinguish Arabic culture. That seems to have only fed the desire and need for flamenco.

“For the people that stayed they lost absolutely everything. They lost their freedom, they lost their family, the material things and the non-material things.

“We transform all this pain into the flamenco step by step. This is how flamenco was born – it was born from the pain and from the way that the people lost their own language.”

Rebeca Sanchez Gallego performs ‘Freedom, Health and Sharing’ at Cavan Town Hall on Saturday, February 28 at 8pm. Tickets €15/ €20.