Flamenco Turnkey

By: Sabina Todaro
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  • Summary

  • A revolutionary key to understand flamenco in its cultural and musical essence, offered by Sabina Todaro.

    Dedicated to those who want to get to konw and/or deepen this art form in a way that is not notional, but using logic and understanding this wonderful phenomenon that is flamenco in all possible aspects, as a tool for life.
    Copyright Sabina Todaro
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Episodes
  • #02 The concept of disfrutar, enjoy - Flamenco Turnkey

    #02 The concept of disfrutar, enjoy - Flamenco Turnkey
    May 29 2022
    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.
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    11 mins
  • #1 When and how flamenco has born - Flamenco Turnkey

    #1 When and how flamenco has born - Flamenco Turnkey
    May 24 2022
    On its historical origin there are no written testimonies that tell us about the history of flamenco, except in the titles of some magazines and newspapers, in the late nineteenth century, that speak of flamenco as an existing phenomenon, without indicating its origin.
    The fact that there are no news really opens the door to any kind of interpretation.

    Where flamenco comes from is clear, by listening to it. It’s very clear that it has a very strong root in Arabic music. On the other hand, 700 years of Moorish presence in the south of Spain can not have gone unnoticed and may not have left as unique legacy issues of architectural type.

    Another root of flamenco, from the musical point of view, is that of Sephardic Jewish music, therefore of the Jews of the diaspora. This kind of music has certainly expanded and gathered informations from other musical genres along the way that has led Jews to spread to various parts of the world, and then, in fact, at some point, to concentrate in Spain and at some point even to be hunted... because it really speaks of very ancient times, yet this Jewish root and the Arab root feel very strong in flamenco until today.

    Another root is certainly a native Spanish root, which can be recognized in the regional folk music of various areas. This has led to a whole series of genres entering flamenco with modifications by some musicians. It is said that these genres were "aflamencados", brought into flamenco in a second moment. It’s a phenomenon that has enormously enriched flamenco but it’s a rather recent phenomenon, it’s a phenomenon that started about a century ago, even less than a century ago. So we’re talking about an art form that, as we see it today, is quite young.

    Last root that is definitely very important is related to gypsy culture. The gypsies, being a traditionally nomadic population, coming from the north of India has traveled a whole path to the Middle East and then, once arrived in the Anatolian peninsula, the gypsies have gone partly towards the north of Europe, of the Balkans, and another part instead towards the Iberian Peninsula passing through the whole Mediterranean Arab world. Well, during all this journey, the gypsies have gathered a whole series of musical and dance legacies from all the territories in which they have passed.

    So flamenco is a collection of these various cultures.
    On the other hand, Andalusia itself is a little east, a little west, a little Africa, a little sea, a little land, a little Mediterranean, a little Atlantic, a little colonies, so it really is a very mixed culture that brings with it a lot of elements.

    Before a certain time, in fact, before about the sixties of 1800, there are no written testimonies in which they named the word "flamenco", but just listen to a toná, one of the oldest Palos of flamenco, to realize that it is absolutely a photocopy, let’s say, of the Koranic chanting or the call to the Arab prayer.

    Flamenco, is born as a lump, therefore, for this reason, is not totally organic in its essence. To make a joke, I say that in flamenco is true everything, the opposite of everything and also other things.

    To try to square the circle and to give universal rules that are always valid in all cases is not possible, because flamenco is really very complex and vast and multifaceted and some things work in one logic and others in another. Our rationality and analytical capabilities, typical of Western culture, can try to analyze flamenco and draw the consequences.

    At this point I have a question: do these elements mixed together make flamenco what flamenco is today? No. Not really, because flamenco, being a living art form, is continuously enriched with new sounds, new possibilities, new musical instruments, new rhythms.

    What can be concluded, however, is that flamenco was really born in the mists of time. It means that its roots, without interruption, really take back a long time, and you can not know exactly when.

    Fortunately, today the times have changed a lot and there is even a science, flamencology, that dedicates to this wonderful and complex musical genre a big curriculum, like that of a real conservatory.

    I’m Sabina Todaro, I deal with flamenco and dances of the Arab world since 1985. I am super passionate about everything that is logical and includes expression, body, music, artistic forms, and above all offers the person who practices it and the person who receives it (therefore also the audience), the opportunity to feel better in their lives. Flamenco has all these characteristics and it is wonderful to investigate in this regard.
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    13 mins
  • #0 Why this podcast? - Flamenco Turnkey

    #0 Why this podcast? - Flamenco Turnkey
    May 5 2022
    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.
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    17 mins

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