El Patio Sevillano

I went to my first pure flamenco show in Sevilla this past weekend at a small, intimate venue called El Patio Sevillano. The dancers were all incredibly well trained and well rehearsed, but with an ability to improvise freely that can only come from a lifelong connection to the art. When the first male flamenco dancer came on, I was subjected to a gracefully forceful display of fundamentally Spanish machismo. His routine was a passionate and prideful showcase of mankind’s physical and mental prowess and his dominion over the rest of the animal kingdom. With a controlled, thunderous stomp and an authoritative spin, he flung his sweat in a sparkling mist through the spotlight on the otherwise dark stage, like a summer night’s rain highlighted under a streetlight. As I sat bewildered, sipping the beer that came free with the 37-euro entrance fee, he whipped around and backhanded the air like it owed him money. It dawned on me that a flamenco stage is perhaps the only setting in which a man in a scarf can twirl his wrists and shake his hips and still look like a badass. After the first male solo, a woman in a scarlet, red, and black ruffled dress took the stage by force, combining delicate beauty and surefooted confidence for an almost boastful reminder of the fact that women are included in the term “mankind” and share that dominion over all else. I was fully captivated for an hour and a half straight, and the show struck me as a quintessential Spanish experience.