The Battle For Flamenco

Spain’s flamenco performers are fighting one another. “Though flamenco is a relatively ‘young’ art, which people only started to pay to see about 160 years ago, arguments about the ‘purity’ of the form are endless and typically stormy. On one side are the fundamentalists, or puris-tas, who admit no diversion from the path of what they see as the true faith. For them, those who mix flamenco with other forms, such as classical ballet, contemporary dance, jazz, or even pop, have diluted the art into a pastiche of the original only worthy of the tablaos, or tourist shows.”