Dance me underground
Claire Marchand brings Spanish counterculture to the stage in all its passion and beauty
Jen Zoratti

A full-length music and flamenco dance collaboration, The Women tells the stories of three tragic female characters in a show that seamlessly combines history, dance, art, literature and music.

It’s a pretty ambitious project, but one that Winnipeg-based flamenco dancer/choreographer Claire Marchand was deeply passionate about.

To get things going, Marchand teamed up with her one-time instructor Claudia Carolina, a respected choreographer and artistic director of Theatre Flamenco Dance Collective, and Ottawa-based dancer/choreographer Juliana Pulford.

Together the trio thought about ways they could use flamenco to tell historically rich, emotionally powerful stories written by influential Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca.

“It started out as a large theatrical idea,” Marchand explains, “but the more we thought about it, the more we thought, ‘Why don’t we just distill three characters from Lorca’s tragedies to represent the core members?’

“That inspires me so much — how do you take a big idea and put it into a dance for one person?” Marchand continues. “Through just music and movement you can tell a story and it can completely transport you. For me, that’s magical. It’s like creating another dimension. I think it speaks to what flamenco can be.”

The Women tells the tales of three separate females living in Spain in the early 1900s, all of whom are main characters drawn from tragedies written by the prolific Lorca, the romantic poet/playwright who was killed in 1936 by Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Though each story is different, the characters are linked by their journeys to redemption from repressive societies.

“Each dancer represents a character from Lorca’s The Earth Trilogy, which is famous in Spain,” Marchand says. “The three plays feature women who essentially had no voice in their society. No one really wrote about women in that time. Lorca was really the first one to address women this way.”

Yerma, to be danced by Carolina, is about a woman ostracized by her community because she is unable to have children — only to find that the problem is her husband’s.

Pulford’s Boda de Sangre (Blood Wedding) is about a woman who runs away with her lover on her wedding day and ends up losing both men.

Marchand herself will dance La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba), about a controlling mother who forbids her daughters to court men after the death of her own husband. Of course, one of them ends up pregnant.

It’s heavy stuff, but subtleties will come from how each tale is told through movement, and each dance focuses on the emotional crux of the story.

“What we’re doing is recreating the landscape through dance and song,” Marchand says. “In between each dance, Madrigaïa interprets folk songs in their own unique way.

“The reason we wanted to work with Madrigaïa is because they’re female. The characters have no voice — they are muted — so to have such a range of voices to represent what’s going on inside is amazing. They all have this huge emotional boiling point that they reach.”

Enlisting the help of the local a cappella collective was a no-brainer for Marchand, while the idea of lending its seven distinctive voices to three women who had theirs silenced made this project intriguing to the girls in Madrigaïa.

“With Madrigaïa, we’re drawn to doing music from all over the world,” says singer Annick Brémault. “We wanted to learn music from Spain and flamenco music, but also the concept of the show was attractive to us because it’s about the voices of women. It’s really neat and it’s special for us to be a part of.”

Madrigaïa will be handling the traditional folk songs Lorca collected, and each song will serve as a transition to the next woman’s story. The septet’s challenge was to arrange the material for seven voices while ensuring that the emotions of each character weren’t lost in translation.

“It’s really rich, powerful music,” Brémault says. “It’s been a challenge to learn. We speak a language (French) that isn’t that far off from Spanish, so the language wasn’t difficult, but it was a challenge to change all the instrumental parts into vocal parts and still convey that emotion.”

Interpreting tragedy in song is one thing, but interpreting it in dance is another. To make the stories move, Marchand drew from her experience as a visual artist when choreographing The Women. The result is a well-considered piece driven by art.

“I have more of a visual-arts background, so I approach it that way,” Marchand says. “I try to have a detached eye. I try to imagine that I’m looking at myself from away, much like a painting. It’s a very visual piece.

“It’s interesting because we’re distilling one character with one dancer, so we need to allude to other people, other situations and elements from her past,” she continues. “We use a few symbolic objects, so sometimes it will seem like a vignette.”

Flamenco isn’t what you’d call a mainstream art form due to its association with persecuted groups and the lower levels of Spanish society, but Marchand says the dance style is quickly picking up a cult following in Canada’s major centres. Spain itself has often had a less than favourable view of flamenco culture, but Marchand says the rest of the world is embracing it as counterculture art.

“In Canada, flamenco is quite new,” she says. “There are little islands of activity. It’s interesting because it’s much like jazz music in the States. Flamenco grew out of pop culture. It didn’t get recognized as an art form until it was appearing in the bars and cafés.

“In Spain, flamenco is always associated with gypsies. People will say, ‘Oh, gypsies do that’ or ‘Lowlifes do that.’ There’s a stigma about it in Spain. It’s been picked up all over the world as art, but I think it will always be somewhat underground.”