The Queen of Metal
Concept and direction: Vanesa Aibar, Enric Montfort
Place and date: Flower Market (1/III/2024)
Traditionally, Barcelona has been a good launching pad for flamenco talents that go beyond purist borders. There is no reason to remember only the case of Vicente Escudero, who developed his entire career in the Catalan capital and came to dance to the beat of the textile looms in an amalgam that I feel is related to the vibration of the chains in The Queen of Metal, but rather in flamenco artists who began their conquest of the great stages of France, Germany and the world here: Israel Galván, for example, in his time at the Taller de Músics, at the TNC and with Sol Picó, or his early Ciutat de Barcelona award. Is it still like this?
Since creation and research, Barcelona remains open to the most heterodox flamenco (Juan Carlos Lérida and his Flamenco Research Laboratory at the Theater Institute, for example), but perhaps the exhibition centers are already left behind.
Or this makes one think of the adventures of The Queen of Metal, who tried to find her place here, and in the end had to go into exile to make her voice heard. Co-production with the Flamenco Biënnale Nederland, music commissioned by the Fonds Podiumkunsten of Holland, and from there to many festivals, then the Max 2023 award for the best dance show, and now back to where they had been little less than invisible, on Friday with the spectators standing. We appreciated the secular ceremony between two very dedicated interpreters, two languages, two highly precise duelists, assembled by rhythm.
The cage of forms is too small for this flamenco overflow, half ritual, half surrender to the slide of the game. Flamenco of contemporary dramaturgy and conception, The Queen of Metal installs the duet-duel of the two performers in a metal ring, between chains and gadgets that look like masks or magical elements.
The metal vibrates with the music and the performer plays both at chaining-linking and at avoiding the chains that surround her. She weighs the stage, in an apocalyptic contest in the style of Mad Max.
Aibar and Montfort continually put themselves to the test, as if at a rock concert the drummer were engaging with the guitarist to see who could add nuances.
It is a spectacle of textures. Of slow moments and other rapid ones, of significant uses even of the costumes (in dance, but also for percussion!), and all in a continuous exhausting crescendo, which seems to seek exhaustion as a form of climax.
Sebastià Gasch had called the Catalan José de la Vega “iron flamenco”, another pillar of our more open tradition. Today the expression suits Aibar and Montfort like no other, and I hope they find the support they deserve here.
