‘It’s Not Because It’s Not There, That It Isn’t There’: Visibility and invisibility within Black flamenco performance

Abstract

Since flamenco's inception, the art form has served as an act of resilience and resistance for marginalized peoples, and now, more than ever before, Black flamenco artists are gaining greater visibility, engaging with the form as embodied activism and interrogation of present and historical injustices. Pointing to the various techniques Black flamenco artists employ to interrogate notions of visibility and invisibility within their performances, this article draws from performance studies, dance studies and Africana studies to analyse the four short films that were created as work-in-progress investigations for London-born Black flamenco artist Yinka Esi Graves's The Disappearing Act (2023). Employing Tavia Nyong'o's theory of afro-fabulation, I examine the myriad ways the piece negotiates Black presence and camouflage within spaces haunted by Spain's role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and looks to the archive to reach into the past, collapse time and imagine futures. In framing The Disappearing Act as an act of afro-fabulation that negotiates Black presence and visibility within flamenco through a trans-temporal engagement with archival information, I argue that the work refuses the invisibilization of Blackness and Black bodies in flamenco's past, present and future. Choreographic analysis and analytical movement description allow me to examine the ways Graves's site-specific work negotiates truth and untruth within what GerShun Avilez terms spatial justice as her physical body serves as trans-temporal marker of the violence associated with histories of chattel slavery. Finally, I highlight the recently formed Black Flamenco Network – Flamencos Unidos Africanos y Afro Descendientes (BFN – FUAAD) to illustrate how contemporary Black flamenco artists are seeking greater representation via community support and online, intergenerational collaboration.

London-born Black flamenco dancer Yinka Esi Graves stands before an endless ocean with her back to the camera. With her feet apart, weight situated in the right hip, she is relaxed as she stands-off with the immense body of water in front of her. No sounds are heard, save for the crashing of the waves, the hissing of moving water, a sound of static that matches the misty fog hanging in the air of the wooded beach environ. This is the opening image of ‘The Coast’, the first of four short films (filmed by Miguel Ángel Rosales) that comprise Graves’s work-inprogress The Disappearing Act, which explores the ‘constant play between being seen and not being seen in the flesh of an African descendent in the diaspora’ (THE DISAPPEARING ACT 2020b)¹.

Since flamenco’s inception, it has served as an act of resistance and resilience for marginalized peoples, and now, more than ever before, Black flamenco artists are gaining greater visibility, engaging with the form as embodied activism and interrogation of present and historical injustices. In this article, I discuss the visibility, or more often the invisibility, of Black bodies on the flamenco stage. First, a discussion of the long-misidentified Jacinto Padilla in an early film by the Lumière brothers sets a precedent for ‘invisibilized’ Black bodies in flamenco performance². Next, I employ choreographic analysis and analytical movement description to examine Yinka Esi Graves’s The Disappearing Act through the lens of Tavia Nyong’o’s (2019) theory of ‘afro-fabulation’. I also explore the ways Graves’s site-specific work negotiates truth and untruth in what GerShun Avilez (2020), after Edward Soja and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, terms ‘spatial justice’ as Graves’s physical body serves as trans-temporal marker of the various locations’ violent histories and associations with chattel slavery. With this case study, I argue that The Disappearing Act, in the myriad ways the piece negotiates Black presence and visibility and looks to the archive to reach into the past to imagine new futures, is an example of a flamenco afro-fabulation. Finally, I highlight the recently formed Black Flamenco Network – Flamencos Unidos Africanos y Afro Descendientes (BFN – FUAAD) to illustrate how contemporary Black flamenco artists are gaining greater visibility via community support and online, intergenerational collaboration³.

Though this article addresses a lack of visibility for Black flamenco artists, I acknowledge their enduring presence and the scholarship and artistry that Black flamenco artists have and continue to contribute to the field; I do not wish to discount their existence nor the importance of the work they do. I write this article simultaneously as an insider and an outsider. I am a flamenco dancer, choreographer, educator and researcher who has studied flamenco dance, singing, history and theory in both Spain and the United States, but I do not inhabit a Black body. This research would not be possible without the knowledge production of past and present Black and Brown scholars and artists, and I thank the members of BFN – FUAAD who generously gave their time and energy to lend their voices to this research⁴.

JACINTO PADILLA‘EL NEGROMERI

In her recent book Sonidos Negros: On the blackness of flamenco (2019), Meira Goldberg recounts the groundbreaking discovery made by scholar Kiko Mora that identified Black flamenco dancer Jacinto Padilla in the short film by the Lumière brothers made at the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World’s Fair in 1900 (129–30). For more than one hundred years, the dancer seen performing alongside José Fernández, Eduardo Salmerón Clemente, Anita Reguera (‘Anita de la Feria’) and two other yet-to-be-identified women outside of the Feria Restaurant was said to be Maestro José Otero Aranda (Mora 2016; Mora 2021: 6; Mora and Goldberg 2019: 41–2; Goldberg 2019: 130). It wasn’t until Mora was able to prove via archival research that Otero was not in Paris during this time that Padilla was finally identified.

Jacinto Padilla, also known as ‘El Negro Meri’, was an acrobat, bullfighter, equestrian and flamenco singer and dancer (Goldberg 2019: 142). Though Padilla’s presence had been largely lost from flamenco’s dance memory until recently, Goldberg reminds us that ‘El Meri was a black man “playing in the field of racialized fantasy” between two white colonial powers [Spain and France]’ (148). After more than one hundred years, Mora and Goldberg proved that the first male flamenco dancer ever to be filmed was Black (129–30). Consideration of the systemic racism within the flamenco world that led to Padilla’s misrecognition, as well as the ways Africanist movement and aesthetics corporeally and musically manifest within flamenco, are currently being investigated by numerous flamenco researchers and scholar-practitioners and are central to Yinka Esi Graves’s contemporary flamenco afro-fabulation and the creation of her recent work-in-progress The Disappearing Act.

THE DISAPPEARING ACT AS AFRO-FABULATION

Throughout his Afro-Fabulations: The queer drama of black life (2019), Tavia Nyong’o provides various definitions, mobilizations and iterations of the term ‘afro-fabulation’, one of them being that afro-fabulation is ‘the persistent reappearance of that which was never meant to appear, but was instead meant to be kept inside or below representation’ (3). This connection between Nyong’o’s handling of appearance and representation and Graves’s performance of camouflage and visibility drives me to view The Disappearing Act as an act of afro-fabulation, a ‘theory and practice of black time and temporality’ (5). In The Disappearing Act, Graves fabulates new value systems for flamenco and explores cartographies of Blackness within the art form through a trans-temporal engagement with the traditional archive and what Diana Taylor terms the ‘repertoire’, knowledge and memory that is stored within and transmitted via the body (2003: 20).

The Disappearing Act’s first instalment, ‘The Coast’, opens with a wide shot of Graves standing before a vast ocean, as described above (THE DISAPPEARING ACT 2020a). The site of this improvisational flamenco dance piece is the shore between Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana, where Graves (2022) traces her maternal lineage. As Graves occupies this space where the feet of captured Africans would have touched the soil of their homeland for the last time, her movement is dominated by contractions and rib, shoulder, elbow and wrist isolations. At times she seems to physically pull the waves to her; in other moments the energy and force of the ocean seem to push against her body, knocking her into deep backbends. With this nine-and-a-half-minute meditation, Graves displays a contemplative and quiet aesthetic to fabulate alternative flamenco modes by calling forth her own genealogical history and that of Spain’s role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Throughout ‘The Coast’, Graves physicalizes a kind of quiet intimacy proposed by cultural theorist Kevin Quashie. In lieu of the rhythmic percussive footwork commonly associated with flamenco, Graves hardly moves her feet, save for a few heel lifts and weight shifts. This sonic quiet creates an ‘aesthetic of intimacy’ that allows for ‘the capacity to feel and connect’ (Quashie 2012: 81, 88). Around the eight-minute mark, as Graves slowly lowers herself into a squat with her bodyweight mainly over her right leg, she inclines her head to the left, listening intently as if in communion with the crashing waves and calling into being the lives lost in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Graves’s costuming adds to the work’s quiet vulnerability. Graves wears a simple and sleek black bra-top and shorts, directly contrasting the floor-length ruffled dresses, flowers and ornate combs that flamenco scholar Cristina Cruces-Roldán describes as flamenco’s ‘normative aesthetics’, in which the bailaoras’s body is ‘hypercorporealized’ by the use of colour, accessories and props (2015: 215–16). With the quiet and calm introspection illustrated through her dress and minimalist movement, Graves aligns with the statement from Nyong’o that ‘fabulation exposes the relation between truth and lying’ (2019: 5, emphasis in original) as she creates an alternative system of flamenco values by manipulating time and dimension within the piece.

I read ‘The Coast’ as living in the spaces between flamenco’s normative aesthetics. I suggest that the sound and visual of the crashing waves on the Ghanaian coast produce a hypnotizing suspension of time. This temporal shift paired with the visual effect of her body, made suddenly so small juxtaposed against the vast ocean, allows for a zooming in and pausing of time where Graves inhabits the spaces between larger movements. When viewed in this way, as an expression of what exists but cannot be seen in real time – an exposing of that which is invisible – Graves creates a new temporality within her flamenco, inhabiting the calm between the oftenexplosive energy found on the flamenco stage. Graves expressed her desire to pull apart, break through and closely examine her flamenco in an interview with Pawlet Brookes in 2020 when she said:

For me, flamenco is a clear example of the idea that things are woven together. So, these stories that try and make things whole, to me, are false in a way. And I think a lot of my work is really just about unpiecing that, and it doesn’t make sense in a way, but it’s constantly a question opens a question. And I feel that I’m constantly opening little holes, making them bigger and bigger and bigger and making space in them. (Brookes 2020: 15:51)

Like Nyong’o, who frames afro-fabulation as ‘the tactical fictionalizing of a world that is, from the point of view of black social life, already false’ (2019: 6), Graves negotiates the complicated relationship between truth and untruth as she opens up and zooms in on narratives that she sees as false, in order to discover and engage with deeper truisms.

The constant rush of ocean waves recalls Christina Sharpe’s aquatic metaphors in her book In the Wake: On blackness and being (2016). Sharpe defines ‘the wake’ as ‘the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery’ (2016: 2). Sharpe’s theory collapses the temporal distance between the time of slavery and the present to argue that because we are ‘living in the wake’ of slavery, it is still very much unfolding and ongoing. In a recent interview, Graves connects her practice of flamenco to Sharpe’s ‘wake work’ and the need to actively acknowledge the precarities of Black life in the wake of slavery:

And that’s something that I think flamenco has really taught me, is how far back we need to go to understand the present and this idea of past-present, which definitely conditions our existence as African descendants across the globe. All these things that happened five hundred years ago are still present, are still influencing where and who we are now. (Brookes 2020: 14:50)

The trans-temporality and ‘past-present’ that Graves asserts illustrate the need for wake work that both includes and transcends mourning and memory. The Disappearing Act reaches into the past, drawing from the archives of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and embodied knowledge gained from moving through the world in a Black body and standing on soil haunted by a violent past to ‘critically fabulate’, as Saidiya Hartman would call it (2008), what has been lost or erased from history. Through her manipulation of time, scope and duration that creates new contexts and boundaries for flamenco, The Disappearing Act rearranges ‘our perceptions of chronology, time, and temporality’ (Nyong’o 2019: 4) to bring figures of the past into the present.

While Graves faces the ocean in ‘The Coast’ to acknowledge ‘those who’d left’, she dances ‘facing those who’d stayed’ in The Disappearing Act’s second piece, ‘The Coast II’, which is filmed in black and white and further inland (Graves 2022). With the ocean still visible behind her, Graves now faces away from it, and the undulations of her arms and torso mimic the soft curves of the spindly tree trunks that surround her. In our conversation, Graves mentioned how charged the space was for her, saying,

being in that space was more than being in a space where lots of people were taken from. It was also me trying to return to some sort of sense of a land that I don’t know. I wasn’t brought up there. (ibid.)

Graves’s internal negotiation of her own lineage and identity is corporealized through her movement. She stands on one leg for much of the improvisation, and the slowness of her shifts in posture highlights the micro-adjustments she makes to balance on her supporting leg. In this video, Graves performs short phrases of percussive footwork in an inverted position. Hinged at the hip, her torso hangs over her legs, and her hands are clasped behind her back. She locks her elbows, and her knuckles point upward towards the sky. From this bound position, her footwork is barely heard as the sound of the crashing waves continues to dominate the space. In ‘The Coast II’, Grave’s internal focus, the monochromatic film style and the muffled effect of the audio reinforce Graves’s solemn contemplation as she bears witness to both sides of a story of loss and recovery.

Stepping into the Iberian Peninsula, The Disappearing Act’s third instalment is ‘The Bridge’. The bridge atop which Graves dances in this piece is El Puente de San Telmo over the Rio Guadalquivir that separates the major city of Seville from the neighbourhood of Triana. In the piece, Graves explores ideas of Black visibility and again collapses time to feel the presence of African peoples who passed through the space. She explains:

For me, it starts with this bridge in Seville, which I used to cross often to go to one of my dance classes and always had the sense that my body was saying to me, ‘Okay, I have people in this water beneath the bridge.’ Later on, I found out that it was the Puerto de Cuba⁵, which is where many of the ships coming from Africa came and where a lot of slaves were disembarked … And so, to me that was like, ‘This is so interesting. There’s no plaque there. There’s nothing to tell you that that was the case’. But somehow this was something that my body knew. (Brookes 2020: 21:39)

Here, Graves comments on the invisibility and lack of historical recognition of slavery in contemporary Spanish mainstream narratives⁶. As the piece begins, a soft breeze blows through Graves’s thin purple hooded blouse. The sound of passing traffic rises as Graves slowly lowers herself into a squat balancing over her right foot. She hovers her extended left leg just off the ground, and both arms reach forward to maintain balance in the pistol squat position. In the caption of the video, Graves poses the question, ‘What does this place have to tell me about who is viable and so therefore visible and who is not viable and so therefore invisible?’ (THE DISAPPEARING ACT 2020c). Throughout the site-specific public improvisation, pedestrians and bikers pass, often making no visible notice of Graves as she moves with painful slowness. ‘The Bridge’ evokes ideas of spatial justice and spatial restriction presented by GerShun Avilez as ‘the artistic, philosophical, and activist project of describing the ongoing denial of freedom of movement for minorities that is paired with the claims of the right of mobility and the right to occupy public space’ (2020: 22). He connects legislature, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States, with increased physical mobility for marginalized groups, asserting that ‘thinking about civil rights necessarily means thinking about space’ (25). Because there is no plaque to acknowledge the role that the site played in chattel slavery, Graves uses her own physical body in ‘The Bridge’ as document and marker of the violence associated with the Puente de San Telmo. In our conversation, Graves (2022) said that she wanted to ask ‘What happens if I’m communing with what is not there? … How do I commune with this question of invisibility for me? What is there that is not visible but can be perceived through the body?’ Recalling Avilez’s assertion that ‘the past is always with us, and it gives meaning and shape to space’ (2020: 30), Graves searches for a truth that is not in the traditional archive or marked in space, and thus often left unrecognized. By corporeally investigating available archival documentation – that of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the surviving film of Padilla and the current lack of recognition of Black bodies in public spaces – Graves compiles these disparate moments into one compressed time, not by taking these ideas out of context, but by ‘creating a new context for it, one based upon a … fabulation of the people who are missing’ (Nyong’o 2019: 8–9, emphasis in original).

Unlike the previous pieces, The Disappearing Act’s fourth instalment, ‘The Forest’, begins with percussive elements common to flamenco as Graves is first heard executing a short repetition of redobles (short bursts of rolling footwork) and palmas (hand clapping). The camera angle widens, and we see Graves standing in profile wearing a pale green long-sleeve, knee-length dress. Graves’s movement explores isolations and staccato bursts of rhythm, but, of the four pieces, ‘The Forest’ adheres the most to traditional flamenco structure and interaction between baile y cante (dance and singing) and is set to Pepe Marchena’s caña (one of flamenco’s 12- beat palos) ‘Soy Séneca en el Saber’. Moving into a deep backbend, Graves repeats the redoble/ palma as a remate to percussively close the letra (sung lyrics) while gazing upward. In traditional structures of flamenco dance, dancers often aim to rematar la letra (to close a percussive phrase/ accent the body at the same time as a letra ends) in this way; it is widely considered the best (that is, most rhythmically satisfying) way to compliment and interact with flamenco cante. What makes this moment so special is that the video was recorded in silence. When filming ‘The Forest’, Graves improvised various movement and percussive phrases that she had previously generated without music playback, but when the audio was layered in during post-production, it matched perfectly. For her, this was yet another articulation of the removals, recurrences and reappearances of the echoes in time that her project engages with.

Still from ‘The Forest’. Image by Miguel Angel Rosales. Image provided courtesy of Yinka Esi Graves

The camera’s frame widens again, and now the deep brown and green of Graves’s skin and dress blend even more with the wooded surroundings. It is here that Graves seems to actively employ tactics of camouflage; the specifics of her movement are difficult to discern from this distance. The video’s caption reads, ‘Crypsis: the ability an animal has to avoid observation or detection by other animals. It may be a predation strategy or an antipredator adaptation. Methods include camouflage, nocturnality, subterranean lifestyle and mimicry’ (THE DISAPPEARING ACT 2020d). With this mention of camouflage and Graves’s previous investigations of visibility, I employ Nyong’o’s ‘shadow archive’ to comment upon Graves’s manipulation of things seen and not seen. Nyong’o’s shadow archive suggests ‘that a camouflaged presence is not an absent presence, and that the points of access to the tenseless time of the virtual are immanent to the changing same of black performance’ (2019: 11–12). It is through these multiple avenues that Graves plays within ideas of camouflage, visibility and flamenco tradition in ‘The Forest’. During our conversation, Graves (2022) said that she envisioned the forest as more of ‘an imagined space’ as opposed to the historically relevant spaces of the coast and the bridge. Her musings on invisibilization combine with literal techniques of camouflage to reference ‘hiding as a way of existing and as a way of being safe’, referring specifically to escaped enslaved peoples (ibid.). Graves utilizes the camera to simultaneously display and hide herself while interacting with sonic echoes of musical structure that are not aurally present in the space. She explains, ‘I think that’s why it’s so important being present. Because it’s not because it’s not there, that it isn’t there, which again is what, for me, The Disappearing Act is about. It’s not because you can’t see it, that it’s not there’ (Brookes 2020: 24:58). This, together with her corporeal investigations of the traditional and bodily archive, filter her flamenco through a critically fabulated archive of Blackness in the Iberian Peninsula to bring forth alternative possibilities and values within the form.

BLACK FLAMENCO NETWORK–FLAMENCOS UNIDOS AFRICANOS Y AFRO DESCENDIENTES

The global Black flamenco community has recently gained greater visibility with the formation of the Black Flamenco Network – Flamencos Unidos Africanos y Afro Descendientes (BFN – FUAAD), which officially launched their online presence in May 2021⁷. In our conversation, Graves (2022) described the creation of BFN – FUAAD as ‘serendipitous’, as she explained that during the surge in Black Lives Matter protests around the world in the summer of 2020, she wrote to some of the Black flamenco dancers that she knew to organize a gathering. At about the same time, she heard that a few USbased flamenco artists had a similar idea and were planning a meeting in the United States. These two groups decided to unite online and discuss what they experience and desire as a global Black flamenco community. With this, yet another instance of an echoing through space, BFN – FUAAD was born.

In July 2021, at the Biennial Flamenco History and Research Symposium, part of the Annual Flamenco Festival in Albuquerque, NM, eight members of BFN – FUAAD presented a hybrid panel discussion called ‘Taking our Place at the Table: Where Do Black Artists Fit in Flamenco?’ (Black Flamenco Network – Flamencos Unidos Africanos y Afro Descendientes 2021b). Explaining the group’s motivation for participating, one BFN – FUAAD member said:

I think there was an interest in mobilizing because people wanted to feel like they existed instead of [like] they were invizibilized. I think they felt like it was important to make a statement that … there’s all these Black people that love flamenco in different ways, but that they exist. And I think everybody kind of felt like they were the only one where they were studying, or they felt alone, so I think it was a way for people to connect with others that felt similar. (personal communication)

During the panel, another BFN member mentioned the importance of coming together across geographical borders to share experiences and a sense of belonging often absent in smaller flamenco communities. They also spoke of the importance of the living archive that exists in the Black flamenco dancing body, especially because of the lack of representation in the traditional archive and the invizibilization of Black flamencos throughout history (Black Flamenco Network – Flamencos Unidos Africanos y Afro Descendientes 2021b).

A few months later, BFN – FUAAD published an open letter to their various social media pages that addressed the ‘current wave of talks on flamenco in the context of healing, racial inequality and/or the African Diaspora’ (Black Flamenco Network – Flamencos Unidos Africanos y Afro Descendientes 2021a). The letter encouraged non-Black flamenco artists and researchers to reflect on their own contributions to the upholding of systemic racism that has excluded or ignored Black and Indigenous voices. The letter closed by stating,

We will not stand by while history continues to leave us out, exoticize us or interpret on our embodied practices while excluding us from the conversation. We, as a collective, already do our own decolonial work. We don’t want to continue to do yours. So please, take a moment to reflect on what we’re telling you. Narratives hold power. Archiving holds power. (Black Flamenco Network – Flamencos Unidos Africanos y Afro Descendientes 2021a)

The group has become a place to share information, learn, provide support, seek increased visibility and reclaim agency for Black flamenco artists and scholars. Their social media presence serves as a digital archive. Its posts and comments regularly support and uplift the performances, publications and artistic ventures of its members.

CONCLUSION

The Disappearing Act, when viewed as an instance of afro-fabulation, creates an alternative archive with which Graves interpolates and imbricates existing historical archives and documentation to investigate Black polytemporality within her flamenco work. Graves’s utilization of an intimate quiet that allows for magnification of spaces in between; her focus on wake work and critical fabulation that interrogates Black temporality; her demand for spatial justice and cartographies of freedom; and her negotiation between what and who are seen, unseen and missing convene in The Disappearing Act to create what can be interpreted as an act of afro-fabulation that gestures towards new truths that balance fact and fiction, the real and the unreal. In her short films, Graves performs both for and against the camera. She hardly acknowledges the camera, denying spectators the fulfilment of their expectations of both a performing Black body and what flamenco looks like, entails and feels like. The Disappearing Act rests upon the web of intersections at flamenco’s core, including ideas of exile, loss and the strength of people who are marginalized, persecuted and victims of genocide. It negotiates the visible and invisible; past, present and future; truth, fact and fiction; and what both is and isn’t there. This multi-layered artistic endeavour offers new ways of engaging with flamenco through Black embodied knowledge and afro-fabulation, creating new cartographies of Blackness in flamenco through its trans-temporal corporeal investigations of the form’s history, present and future.

I quote Graves in the title of this article, ‘It’s not because it’s not there that it isn’t there’, meaning just because something may not be seen, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The embodied and archival research being done by members of BFN – FUAAD and other flamenco researchers is shifting the landscape of flamenco’s past, present and future, converting that which has always been there – Black dancers and Africanist roots – but not always visible, into that which is seen, named, honoured and is most definitely there.

Notes

1 Since the writing of this article, two more short films, ‘The Island’ and ‘The Door’ (both uploaded 23 February 2022), were added to the online work-in-progress collection. Additionally, Graves presented The Disappearing Act: Una conversación desde un cuerpo disidente, an illustrated talk surrounding the work’s major themes and ideas, at the 2022 Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla. The live version of the work, The Disappearing Act, premiered in January 2023 at the Nimes Flamenco Festival in France. Discussion of the most recent two videos, the oral presentation and the live performance of The Disappearing Act are outside of the scope of this research, which analyses only the online videos that comprise the piece’s primary work-in-progress research material.

2 Gottschild (1996) coined the term ‘invisibilized’ in the context of African diasporic influences on US-American culture.

3 Ethnographic interviews with Yinka Esi Graves and other members of BFN – FUAAD were determined exempt under category #2b by The Office of Responsible Research Practices of The Ohio State University.

4 In oral presentations of previous versions of this research, I have played audio clips of the Black flamenco artists that I quote at length in an effort to ameliorate/avoid further invisiblization. Rather than speak their words in my own voice, I play the audio recordings as an attempt to evoke their presence in the space, thereby honouring their agency, voices and points of view.

5 El Puente de San Telmo connects what is now known as Plaza de Cuba (on the Triana side) and Puerta Jerez (on the Seville side).

6 For more on the history of African-descended peoples in Spain and Afro-Andalusian contributions to flamenco, see Miguel Ángel Rosales’s (dir.), Gurumbé: Canciones de tu Memoria Negra (Gurumbé: Afro-Andalusian Memories) (Intermedia Producciones, 2016).

7 The first posts on The Black Flamenco Network – FUAAD’s Facebook and Instagram (@ blackflamenconetwork) pages appeared on 31 May 2021.