On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Federico Garcia Lorca, this year's edition could not miss an evening dedicated to flamenco. The choice fell on a very young Spanish company, founded only last year by Bélen Maya. Daughter of an artist, Bélen began to learn about the art of flamenco from her parents, Carmen Mora and Mario Maya. With Bélen's father, a dancer considered by José Blas Vega to be one of the most complete flamenco dancers, dancers and choreographers such as Carmen Cortés, who has already been successfully hosted at the Oriente Occidente Festival, have worked. Bélen Maya began her career dancing in tablaos known as Cafè de Chinitas in Madrid and the Tablao de Carmen in Barcelona, later working as a soloist and prima ballerina in both her father's company and that of Carmen Cortés. La Diosa en nosotras is the work that marks the debut of her young company. A group born with the aim of working in flamenco to reinterpret the ancient Andalusian dance with energy and feminine temperament. Maya explains: “In recent years, the bailaores have been the object of great attention and support, so much so that we have started dancing like men, forgetting how to dance “being a woman”, that is, according to our energy, our feelings, our emotions. By giving strength back to our language, we try to strengthen the union between us, demonstrating that flamenco is not only struggle and rivalry. Ours is not a feminist project, but a project of expression of femininity”. The birth of the company also responds to the desire to make known the young flamenco dancers who currently exist in Spain. Chosen not by chance among the protagonists of Carlos Saura’s latest film, Flamenco, Bélen Maya has created La Diosa en nonotras for an all-female cast, giving a contemporary interpretation of the soul of flamenco. The music is an original composition by the musician Emilio de Diego. The show ends with Flamenco, a choreographic piece in which solos and group sequences alternate and in which two guitarists and two male singers participate, according to the most common style of Andalusian dance. Maya specifies: “We are interested in recovering the idea of the stage as a sacred space, in which the ritual of dance and flamenco is performed. Let us recover ourselves as priestesses of this ritual, as dancers who express the energy of the feminine spirit with the greatest possible purity, without manipulation, concessions, seduction, stereotypes. To recognize and reconcile the masculine with the feminine in a creative project on the stage and on flamenco”.
