Fleet fingers, furious feet

By WILLIAM DART

Paco Pena is a legend and a persuasive one; even hard-bitten Brit critics leave his performances wishing they were flamenco dancers. His range seems limitless, from classic stylings of Montoya and Ricardo guitar miniatures to last year's ambitious theatre piece Voices and Echoes.

This work offered a fascinating history of flamenco, incorporating live and archival music, spectacular dancing, all launched by a high-tech Pena at a computer screen.

The Spanish musician is in town to present Flamenco in Concert, a less spectacular but - if Australian reactions are anything to go by - no less galvanising presentation. I caught up with him in the middle of a hearty Australian breakfast.

The 61-year-old's memories go back, he says, "for almost a lifetime" and include, at the age of 6, falling under the spell of flamenco master Ramon Montoya, when he saw him at a stadium concert.

"I have a sweet memory. I knew I was with some important person there. It wasn't as if I thought, 'Wow, this is the great Montoya', but I could tell there was a great presence there. My father didn't take me to that many places and the whole thing was a real occasion."

In recent years, Pena has been seen as taking a stand on "flamenco puro", distancing himself from the crowd-pleasing tactics of such acts as the Gypsy Kings.

He agrees. "There are aspects of flamenco which are easier to appreciate and to be excited by, and these are the ones which tend to be exploited; real flamenco demands a deep and intense commitment.

"We do need to move forward in flamenco, but you can't do that gratuitously. You can't just discover other beautiful things and transpose them into flamenco; that is not right. You must absorb these things into your self, into your soul, become richer through them, and then work it into your music.

"The people I'm working with on this tour have done that. Certainly as a dancer Fernando Romero is almost aggressively modern, but it works because he also maintains connections with his roots."

Pena is happy with the format of the Auckland show. "It is very concise, very exposed and very intense. There are no props, the artists simply show what they can do; it's just the music and them.

"The first half opens very simply, with me playing solo guitar and, when I bring Fernando Romero in, we do a suite of music by Montoya. Fernando has created a choreography for the both of us which is really particular, unlike anything else you might have seen in flamenco."

This quietly spoken man is not afraid to express some fairly strong opinions. Although Carlos Saura's 1983 film Carmen brought flamenco into the consciousness of the arthouse masses, he still feels it is "not a significant landmark in the art of flamenco", and he laughs when he recalls giving the liturgy a rewrite for his Flamenco Mass ("The original was dry, like a contract").

Surely flamenco, with its raw, confrontational passion, could be the supreme vehicle for musical politics?

"Flamenco is not political," he replies. "Andalusia has been abused and had very bad conditions for hundreds of years but we have never actually rebelled. Rather than sing 'Comrades, follow me', the subject has always been 'Gee, what is happening to me?'

"However, the social cry of the singer has always made people aware that Andalusians have had precarious lives and survive with difficulty. It's there but it's not overt."

We talk of the concept of "duende" - roughly, a transcendent climax in performance - and Pena is quick to mention Garcia Lorca, who "wrote an essay which came really close to explaining it".

Pena sees it as "the moment when not only the artist but his audience gets to a pinnacle of emotion. When that happens, everyone is fulfilled, and that's when duende appears. Something magical happens out of the ordinary and it's not only a flamenco thing - it can manifest itself in really great art anywhere".

Be prepared, then, for duende aplenty on the stage tomorrow night.

Performance

What: Paco Pena

Where: Auckland Town Hall

When: tomorrow 8pm