Winner of the Vicente Escudero Award and the Young Performers Competition at the Seville Flamenco Biennial in 1996, Israel Galván is one of the new talents of Spanish dance. As a principal dancer he worked with Mario Maya's Compañia Andaluza de Danza, with Carlos Saura in the film Flamenco, and with Manuel Soler for the inaugural show of the Seville Biennial in 1996. Thanks to his style, balanced between flamenco tradition and modern dance, Galván won over audiences and critics just a year ago at the 10th Seville Flamenco Biennial with Mira! Los Zapatos Blancos/Los Zapatos Rojos. A show in two parts that combines a performance of seguiriyas, cantinãs, soleares, with a curious reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen's famous fairy tale The Red Shoes, it is a flamenco production that plays on the contrasts between purity and contamination in dance and music. Los Zapatos Blancos is set in a rehearsal room where a group of musicians and a dancer meet to start a new show. The singing and music of this first part are in the flamenco tradition, while the dance opens up to contemporary inflections. The percussionist is Manuel Soler, an artist who was part of Paco de Lucía’s Sexteto for more than ten years and who collaborated closely with Galván in the production of the show. In Los Zapatos Rojos the choreography is dramaturgically based on Andersen’s The Red Shoes, which in 1948 gave rise to the eponymous masterpiece by Michael Powell starring Moira Shearer. Galván uses it to create a choreography whose main theme is the obsession with dance, an obsession that becomes madness and which is linked to the tragic life of Felix Fernandéz García. Discovered by Diaghilev in Seville, this dancer was invited to work with the Ballets Russes to teach Léonide Massine the secrets of flamenco. Felix, of whom there is also a portrait signed by Picasso, hoped to be able to play the part of the miller in Massine's ballet The Three-Cornered Hat with music by Manuel de Falla, but the role was danced by the choreographer himself. His furious passion for dance, frustrated by the impossibility of treading the boards, led him to have increasingly frequent attacks of madness. Felix "El Loco" died insane in 1941 in a sanatorium. Felix's path is full of coincidences with Andersen's fairy tale in which a Spanish soldier gives a girl red shoes that force her to dance non-stop until she goes mad. Furthermore, it was Massine who signed the choreography for Powell's film. Galván mixes all this in a duo between himself and Manuel Soler who, with the help of video projections and the use of two puppets, is dedicated to the flamenco obsessions of “El Loco”, revisited to the music of John Coltrane, Valcarlcel Medina, Conlon Nancarrow.
