sevilla - flamenco in parentheses

OldDogs... meet and greet

By midweek we are sweltering in Sevilla. Like a mad dog [and her Englishman] we go out walking in 42 degrees. The streets are almost deserted as the locals sensibly stay indoors for siesta. 

We hit on the plan of buying a multi-trip bus ticket and exploring the city by air-conditioned bus, the coolest place to be, so we jump on the first bus that comes along.

Outside of the old city, we pass endless blocks of shabby high-rise apartments. I see broken wooden blinds and a sheet strung between windows to dry. This is seedy Sevilla.

It reminds me of my first view of people living in relative poverty in Hong Kong in the late seventies.

  I feel sad to see about fifty infant children playing in a concrete school yard in the heat. Not a tree or a bush or a piece of play equipment to be seen.

The children look happy and squeal with delight  as they chase a plastic ball around the yard, but it is such a contrast to our well equipped kindergartens in Australia.

Back in the city centre, Sevilla shares her secrets.

I find her in the streets, the markets and bars, the shops and cultural centres in the residential areas. She is melancholy at her core, but also a woman of many moods.
 

In the Plaza Nueva a group of firemen congregate and their spokesperson, a woman, shouts stridently for more pay, while in Plaza Major a group of university students protest that education is a right not a privilege. Sevilla stamps her feet and tosses her head in anger at the state of the economy.
 

She is proud and haughty too. At a local restaurant where an arty looking crowd of students are eating and drinking, we place an order for food and wine. The food doesn't arrive for over two hours, although other patrons who arrive after us are served, and the young waiter ignores us. I realise it is because we are foreigners. There is a growing dislike of us as Sevilla becomes increasingly dependent on tourism.
 

Usually we experience warmth and generosity from Sevilla. The beautician with the tiniest hands who does my nails with such care and gives me a wonderful hand and arm massage, her only English word being "beautiful" when she surveys her handiwork. The waiter who says "Now I am speaking the English" and tries so hard to communicate with us; the family who gesture for me to sit with them at their table at another outdoor concert.

Often she is in a joyous party mood, looking for a fiesta, a jug of sangria and a reason to dance or sing the night away.  A group of mature women get out their flamenco dresses and sing spanish folk songs; what they lack in ability they make up for in enthusiasm.  Young and old get up and dance the Sevilla to a younger group of singers. A Spanish Beatles cover band sings "Shake it up baby" and I find myself doing just that!

 To Sevilla family is sacred. All those "Virgin Mary with child" images!  Bridal shops abound and on Saturdays there are weddings everywhere. People throw rice as the newly weds and their brilliantly coloured entourage emerge from the ceremony. 
 

There are babies and young children everywhere, often three generations out together, sometimes until midnight. Little girls wear pretty dresses and their hair ribbons match the colour of their shoes...red, blue or yellow. I don't hear anyone scold a child. People struggle with pushers on footpaths that are way too narrow, so they try to balance them on two wheels. And I have never seen so many twins. Is it something in the water or the wine?

Because people live in apartments and it is so warm, life is lived out of doors, particularly at night, and it is such a social and communal way of life, so different from Australia suburbia where you are lucky to know your neighbours. I will miss Sevilla's laughter and the buzz of conversation.

We attend a Charo Martin flamenco fusion concert at the local cultural centre and see another side of Sevilla. We seem to be the only tourists there.

Not only is the performance a modern fusion of flamenco, jazz, bossa nova and old Spanish music styles, but it is a serious and satirical self examination. The female dancer comes out in a short black dress and dances in an almost grotesque overtly sexual way and the male dancer follows lifting his coat  and wriggling his bottom, a dramatic expose of what is happening to flamenco and Sevilla. The female dancer comes back, dressed in the white suit and panama hat of the chorro, a reminder of Spain's imperialist past. The singing and playing is wonderful. This is intelligent, self critical Sevilla.

Night and day... waiting