Flamenco is a complex and wonderful art form.
I am Sabina Todaro I deal with flamenco dance and music of the Arab world and a series of other things quite infinite ranging from neurology to anatomy psychology to all the mechanisms of the learning processes.
I offer you a complete vision of this phenomenon, that takes into account music, dance, culture, the way of considering life and living, the way of expressing and communicating that characterizes it.
What I tell you in my podcasts of the series "Flamenco turnkey" is the result of my experiences reached by studing, reading, listening, traveling and daily practice of teaching flamenco dance, baile flamenco.
This first podcast is number 0 on the show, and it gives you an idea of why I say what I say.
And I say unconventional things about flamenco, and I’m going to show it to you in a perspective that maybe you never considered.
I decided to do this series of podcasts because we have no clear ideas about flamenco: everyone knows it roughly.
It is a complex, complete, complicated phenomenon that has a thousand incredible and very interesting facets.
My job as a dance teacher (I teach in Milan, Italy) takes me daily to see people, who approach this kind of dance which is so complex, and so tiring. The most important thing is that this can be a means to help people really express themselves.
I did not stop to the stage of repeating the steps that I myself had learned, and I began to investigate more and more deeply the meaning of flamenco from its cultural point of view.
The heart of flamenco is the cante, the singing. And in the baile the body behaves exactly as a good guitarist should do: it does not eat the space of the singer, the cantaor. He listens to him, enjoys his presence and helps him to stay inside the thing he is doing. At the service of others with humility and pleasure.
What I have to do is not to show my skills, but to live my emotions deeply and give them to the audience, whatever my technical level is.
I wonder every day what flamenco wants from us and what we want from it, why we like it so much, why an artistic form generated in such a specific place, which is the southern part of Spain, has spread like wildfire all over the five continents. It obviously touches deeply human cords that are common to every human being on the planet.
Flamenco is a trick for me. It’s a system that forces me to investigate within myself to understand who I am and to bring out what I am and to recognize myself in what I am deeply. And it gives me the ultimate privilege of helping other people to do the same.
Flamenco is a means, not the goal.
During all the months in which due to force majeure (read Covid) we had to do online lessons, obviously none of us, at home, could really clap the feet, make noise, because the neighbors would not allow it.
So I had to resort to something else: investigating inside of me all that flamenco brought me, it had given to me over the years, to the sound of emotions and experiences, and overturn it outside of me, offering it as I felt it to my students.
In the first place must be the expressive dimension of flamenco and the technique will come as a consequence, as long as I am always present, attentive to what I am doing, and to everything I am doing I put a wonderful thing called intention. We can feel the pleasure in the body, the pleasure of being alive in this wonderful music.
I was also asked to give theoretical lessons on flamenco, very similar to these podcasts that I am now composing, so not the usual things that are found in all the books that talk about the history of flamenco, flamenco music, flamenco artists and so on.
I always give a very personal vision and always invite people to ask themselves questions.
Understand why at some point UNESCO made it an intangible universal heritage of the humanity. It’s not because it’s so beautiful, because we like it so much, but because it speaks about human emotions, which are really universal.
The body and mind are one. I can intervene on the mind through the body, as well as on the body through the mind. Flamenco is a wonderful way to experience it.
When I taught more mechanically, I could notice that only one in ten people was learning. Well, now they learn ten out of ten people. All ten will learn to do a wonderful thing called dance. Dance is all that happens when I’m not standing still. Dance is all that happens while I’m living.
