In flamenco the concept of disfrutar, enjoy it, is central, a real key to interpret the true value of making music and dancing. Disfrutar is a manifesto of the hymn to life, to enjoy the life that flamenco is in its essence.
What does disfrutar mean? It means enjoying it. When musicians are playing, they try in every way not only to have fun, as they also do, but to enjoy it, to enjoy the present situation and to put others, be they fellow musicians or some dancer, or the audience itself. Put, in fact, able to enjoy the situation to the fullest.
The basic concept is that if I’m okay with you, you’re probably okay with me, and if I make you feel clearly that I’m okay with you, you’ll most likely make me feel as clearly that you’re okay with me, and that’s a starting point.
But there is another point in flamenco, which is very important: if I make you feel good about yourself, you will be fine with yourself, you will have more fun, you will enjoy more and therefore you will try to repay me with the same coin. So I help you get better, enjoy it more, and you help me do the same.
Evidently, in this perspective, there is no room for the exhibition of one’s own abilities at the expense of others: there is no room for lack of listening and egocentrism, there is only room to enjoy the present situation and to be totally present in the present.
We often think of flamenco as a very difficult thing. But it is not in its complexity and difficulty its great gift. Let’s say that complexity or technical difficulty is a kind of weapon, it is a card to play, but the true essence of flamenco lies in this little word that is disfrutar. When the artists are enjoying the situation, flamenco is born.
But what you need to do, to enjoy the situation? Be present!
Often in our life we make this mistake: we are not present and we do not enjoy the experience. Well, flamenco does not allow you to make this mistake: the moment you are not present, and you are thinking about something else, you completely disconnect from the music. If you are dancing, playing, singing flamenco you lose the rhythm, the tone and you can’t do anything anymore.
All people who are very deeply into flamenco know that heartless flamenco does not exist flamenco. Heartless flamenco is not flamenco
Pleasure is the key to everything. Flamenco just wants you to be okay and that doesn’t mean just talking about fun and cheerful, carefree things, on the contrary, flamenco often speaks about very hard themes, very black, very sad, melancholy, despair, but everything is always done with a bottom of joy of living, and a bottom of pride of what we are and why we are so, which is really amazing.
If I do not enjoy the present situation, whatever my technical level, what I am doing is an empty as useless technical exercise. The message is the joy of living, and the search with all the humanly possible tools, to make others feel good being ourselves. I feel better, because I express something that is inside of me and I do it right to the end, with presence and with pleasure, even if it is, in fact, a painful emotion I let it out of me.
Disfrutar is an action that requires presence, listening, being here, that is in the body (because here, if we are not in the body, we are not!) and now.
Here at the moment, then in the present situation. As a psychomotor scientist and a neuroscience scholar, I say if we’re not in the body, we’re just not.
We don’t have a body: we are a body.
I’m Sabina Todaro, I deal with flamenco and dance and music of the Arab world since 1985, through travel, study, listen. I have bothered musicians and dancers, I have travelled extensively in Andalusia, looking for what flamenco is in its territory of origin.
What I tell you, I tell you, is not what I read in a book, but what I have experienced and what I have heard in the stories of people who have experienced it firsthand and who live it daily in the first person. My purpose is to make people think, not to tell for the umpteenth time something that in any book can be safely found, read and learned. I claim to urge people to reflect, in fact, to use their intelligence to reason about things.
When I focus on pleasure, I’m already one step away from flamenco, or maybe I’m already one step into flamenco.
