Flamenco is an art form that incorporates singing, guitar playing and dancing, as well as polyrhythmic hand-clapping and finger snapping. It often also features some call and response, with the audience encouraged to shout “Olé!”. Flamenco first emerged in Lower Andalusia nearly 300 years ago. Over time, it has been shaped by musicians and performers from Latin America, Europe and the Caribbean and there is now a variant called ‘Nuevo Flamenco’ (New Flamenco), which has been influenced by modern musical genres including rumba, salsa, pop, rock and jazz. Therefore, most Flamenco performances today bear little resemblance to what was originally labelled ‘Flamenco’ in the 18th century.
The origins of Flamenco lie in the singing and rhythms performed, or produced, by individual people whilst they were going about their everyday life. For example, Flamenco was the song that a worker was singing in the field or that women were singing whilst celebrating a family event. This singing was an individual and personal outpouring of emotion and it was therefore very free and spontaneous.
The first public performances of Flamenco date to the middle of the nineteenth century when it spread from the South of the Spain to Madrid and other cities as a result of the rise of mass urban culture and foreign tourism. Before this, Flamenco had been developing as an art form in private settings, often in social contexts such as work or family ceremonies.
The World Fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave Flamenco much more exposure than it had previously had. It was at this point that it came to be strongly associated with a Spanish national identity. However, many Spaniards fought against Flamenco being their national symbol. This was largely due to it being associated with the ostracised Gypsy population, who had settled in Andalucia in the fifteenth century and had mixed with the Arab and Jewish people who also lived there.
These groups shared traditions and cultures and it was precisely this exchange and mixing of musical forms and customs that gave birth to Flamenco singing. However, since these populations were ostracised from Spanish society at the time of the World Fairs, the fact that foreigners imposed the Flamenco identity onto Spain as a whole was viewed as a backhanded compliment by some Spaniards because they saw it as stifling their progress towards modernity.
Between the Restoration in 1874 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Flamenco’s critics were divided into three main groups. Firstly, there were the left-leaning intellectuals and politicians who saw Flamenco, along with other traditions such as bullfighting, as keeping Spaniards in a stronghold of backwardness. Secondly, on the other end of the political spectrum, the Catholic church and its conservative allies grouped Flamenco with other forms of mass cultural entertainment that supposedly led to immodesty, the breakdown of the family and the weakening of the Patria, or nation. Finally, the leaders of the Revolutionary Workers’ Movements criticised Flamenco for exploiting people’s poverty and distracting workers from the need for a revolution to solve social, economic and political inequality.
Despite the resistance it faced, Flamenco gained a lot of popularity in the early twentieth century. This was helped by foreign intellectual and musicians, including Claude Debussy, endorsing Flamenco “deep song” which led to Spanish intellectuals declaring that this specific form of flamenco was part of “high culture.” Unsurprisingly, given the importance of the Catholic Church during Franco’s dictatorship, Flamenco performances reduced massively after the Civil War. Franco and the Church tried to replace it with folk dancing and singing in order to promote a new kind of national identity.
However this didn’t take off on a global, or even European, scale. Therefore, in the 1950s, Franco’s regime was forced to change tact and promote Flamenco, using images of female Flamenco dancers as advertisement, in order to kickstart the tourism industry and boost the Spanish economy. This was hugely successful and cemented flamenco as one of the most recognisable symbols of Spanish culture.
Since Franco’s death in 1975, Flamenco has continued to undergo an extreme commercialisation with tourists still flocking to flamenco shows to experience “authentic” Spanish culture. Moreover, in the last fifty years, Flamenco has enjoyed a renewed artistic and academic respect that recognises and celebrates its history and origins, and UNESCO recognised it as part of the World’s Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010. This demonstrates the significant role that Flamenco has played in shaping Spain’s image, even if Spanish students are reluctant to enjoy a show in a tablao de flamenco.
