The pleasure in moving: drawing the space through flamenco bodies

ABSTRACT

This article develops an analysis of flamenco performance and religious processions in Andalusia by deploying and extending Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of drawing, using the results of extensive ethnographic field research completed by the author among the Roma community in southern Spain. The article demonstrates how the Gitano body becomes a corpus of drawing, in Nancy’s sense, through a performance of tracing. The logic of this trace entails an originary intermingling of time and space, as well as a structural overlapping of the animate and the inanimate. Far from being purely abstract, such tracing is read as the choreographed self-portraiture of the Gitano community itself. The author argues that the performers and ethnographic researcher meet and intersect in a shared space of extension. In this sense, the tracing of flamenco bodies parallels the performative dimension of auto-ethnographic writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Flamenco performance
• religious processions
• choreography
• drawing
• ethnography
• philosophy
• performative writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A Tablao is a cabaret specializing in flamenco shows, modeled on the old cafes cantantes. They came into existence in the 1950s. See Leblon 2003, 133.

2. In reference to Jouissance, conceptualized by Nancy (2013) in Corpus II.

3. The term trace relates to the verb tracer, ‘to draw’. It is translated as ‘tracing out’, although the term evokes an outline, a layout, or the plotting of a line. The Pleasure in Drawing (Nancy 2013, 109).

4. For more view A Manuscript of the Last Sultan of al-Andalus and the Fate of the Royal Library of the Nasrid Sultans at the Alhambra by Josef Ženka (Ženka 2018).

5. In a text titled, ‘Information on the Critical Situation of the Neighborhoods in the hills of Granada,’ the evictions are qualified as ‘the third expropriation that the habitants from the hills will suffer’ after the ones of the expulsion of the Moorish and gitanas families. (de López and Beluschi Fabeni 2014, 17, author’s translation).

6. For more discussion on flamenco, see Ordoñez Flores (2008, 33–47, 1990).

7. ‘Anything so addressed to the body – outside – is exscribed, as I try to write it, right along this outside, or as this outside. “Ontology of the body” = exscription of being. Existence addressed to an out-side (… does the receiving; myself, you, us, bodies, finally). Existence: bodies are existence, the very act of existence, being’ (Nancy 2008, 19).

8. For more about the flamenco body movements above the waistline, see ‘De Cintura Para Arriba, Hipercorporeidad y Sexuación en el Flamenco’ (Cruces Roldán 2003b).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ontario Trillium Foundation [0]; York University [0].

Notes on contributors

Miriana Lausic

Dr. Miriana Lausic holds a PhD from York University, Toronto, as a recipient of the Ontario Trillium Scholarship and the Provost Award. Her work, ‘Transgression in Flamenco and Tauromaquia: Choreographing Dance Studies with Philosophy’ (2016) is situated in the field of dance studies in collaboration with visual arts and explores a multidisciplinary engagement with the fields of ethnography, philosophy and critical theory. Miriana completed her MFA in Choreography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a degree in History from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She has presented her current research at: World Dance Alliance Memorial University; Arts in Society, American University in Paris; Derrida Today at London Goldsmiths; The World Dance Alliance in Angers, France; Arts in Society at the University of Sapienza, Rome; Canadian Society for Dance Studies/Society of Dance History Scholars; and York University’s Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean.