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Flamenco without a net: Los Farruco is the real thing
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El Farrú, the latest heartthrob in the Farruco clan
Twenty-one-year-old Gypsy heartthrob El Farrú drives the girls in Spain crazy with his smoldering good looks. But those who know flamenco know he’s got two things much more precious than a movie star face. Flowing through his veins, he’s got compás--that impeccable sense of flamenco rhythm. And he’s got guts. So does his cousin Barullo (18), his mother La Farruca, his aunt La Faraona and the other members of their big Gypsy clan.
When you’ve got compás, you’ve got high-octane fuel in the tank. And when you’ve got compás and guts together, you’re going to fly high.
Los Farruco, as the family is known, performs this Saturday and Sunday at City Center as part of the New York Flamenco Festival 2009, which runs through February 22. They’ll be performing with guitarists Antonio Rey and El Tuto and singers El Rubio de Pruna, Pedro el Granaíno, Antonio Zúñiga and Mara Ray. People who know flamenco are betting the group will bring down the house.
Famous for their spontaneous and fiercely emotional style of dancing, the Farruco family is in a class by itself. Today most theatrical flamenco is highly choreographed and polished to a fine sheen, but the Farrucos are some of the last stage dancers willing to take risks and improvise. Like the best jazz musicians who invent their own riffs and run with them, the Farrucos create in the moment. The audience never knows exactly what’s going to happen next.
“You have to be secure and brave to improvise,” says Estela Zatania, an author and aficionada who writes for a flamenco website in Madrid. “The Farrucos are ready to gamble the possiblity of disaster for the chance to electrify. They’re like trapeze artists working without a net.”
It must be said that the Farrucos live the same way they dance—on the edge. Farrú’s older brother Farruquito (26)--who took New York audiences by storm in 2001 and 2003 and was named one of the “50 most beautiful” by People magazine—spent time in prison last year, after being convicted of manslaughter in a hit-and-run. While this twist of fate might seem close to unthinkable for a ballet dancer, it isn’t—necessarily—for a flamenco artist.
For generations, the flamenco road and the prison road have often crossed. There is even a kind of flamenco song called the carcelera that laments the prisoner’s life.
For three days I’ve eaten
Only bread and tears--
That is the food
My jailers give me!
Goes one soulful verse.
According to tradition, flamenco—like the blues—was born in poor, dusty villages and ramshackle slums. Maybe that’s one reason its moods tend to shift so quickly from the brightest joy to the blackest sorrow.
The Farrucos come from a line of itinerant Gypsy horse-traders and basket weavers. Farrú’s and Farruquito’s grandfather was the great dancer Antonio Montoya Flores, known in his day as El Farruco.
“I never took a dance class,” the old patriarch told me when I interviewed him in 1996, shortly before his death. “The horses taught me how to dance with the sounds of their hooves.” But when the time came, he took a firm hand in the flamenco training of his children and grandchildren.
He took grandson Farruquito (Juan Manuel Fernández Montoya) under his artistic wing when the boy was a toddler, teaching him in the complexities of flamenco rhythms and drilling him in taconeo, the stamping of feet. Farruquito went professional before he was six and danced in a Carlos Saura movie with his grandfather at the age of twelve.
When Farruco died in 1997, Farruquito became head of the family. He was just 16 at the time. Three years later, the New York Times hailed Farruquito as “one of the great flamenco dancers of this new century.”
It wasn’t long before his younger brother Farrú and cousin Barullo were turning heads and wowing the critics too. Baby brother El Carpeta (now 11) was waiting in the wings.
The Farrucos dance a style known as flamenco macho. It’s angular, powerful, assertive and—as interpreted by the younger generation—verging on the acrobatic. There is a dash of hip-hop in some of the boys’ moves, yet their compás and attack remain impeccable and absolutely Gypsy.
Although Farruquito takes credit as artistic director on this weekend’s program, he and Carpeta are staying home this year, leaving Farrú and Barullo to win American acclaim.
No doubt the boys will dazzle. Thoughtful critics will look for the superb authority and grace of La Farruca to add gravitas to their star turns.
“La Farruca is an essential link in the chain, and she is one of the finest female dancers,” says Zatania. “She projects a dark, feline essence that is unique in these times of superficial glam-flamenco.”
Even more than focusing on any particular artist, longtime aficionados will be waiting and hoping for a total chemistry—one where singers, guitarists and dancers fall into perfect compás together and light a communal fire. If they do, an otherworldly updraft will rip through the theater. With Los Farruco, there is always that potential.
Los Farruco - Sat Feb 21, 8:00 pm & Sun Feb 22, 3:00 pm
New York City Center
W. 55th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, NYC
$35, $45, $65, $80
Tickets: CityTix® (212) 581-1212 or nycitycenter.org
The New York Flamenco Festival is sponsored by the World Music Institute
Links to YouTube flamenco videos:
Farru dancing at Jerez Noche Magica
Barullo dancing at Jerez Noche Magica
Farruquito & Faruco dance soleares in Carlos Saura's "Flamenco" 1995 (El Chocolate sings)
La Farruca dancing, husband El Moreno singing on television (1970s)
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Flamenco dancer Omayra Amaya sizzles in the Village - New York City Life Examiner
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