Sara Baras has been showing her soul on stage for almost two years, the show that combines flamenco and bolero to continue the successful career of the bailaora from San Fernando de Cádiz, who this year celebrates 25 years of her company. A quarter of a century that has taken her to the main theaters in the world, reaping uninterrupted successes like the ones she achieved with her previous shows, such as Sombra or Voces. This Sunday he lands at the Jardins de Terramar festival in Sitges (10 p.m.) where he will receive the Nenúfar award, one more trophy to add to his showcase as the Olivier award, the most prestigious of English performing arts, which he collected this month in London .
Alma is dedicated to Sara's father, a lover of boleros who died in January of this year while the artist continued to perform at the express wish of her father. “My father and I always talked about the difficulty that flamenco has, the difference between the styles”, comments the bailaora in a telephone conversation to explain the origin of the show. “One way for him to relate it better was by mixing a flamenco style with a bolero, and that way he was going to differentiate it”. This is how the idea came about, “it started out as almost a game and something very interesting came out of it”, he comments, noting that the mix of genres goes beyond music, “in the set design, in the costumes, the choreography, in the way to unite the passion and strength of flamenco with that sweetness and that beautiful way that the bolero has”.
When it comes to fusing genres, Sara Baras is clear that respect for tradition is essential, as is artistic maturity. “We already have a very strong label, very rooted, in whatever you do you never forget what you are, you can use the bolero fusion but you really are still a flamenco”, a personality that is easy to maintain thanks to the identity so strong that the gender has. Neither does she forget to mention the previous work of artists such as Paco de Lucía, Camarón or Morente, “they have done a number of fusions and things that, in that sense, following in their footsteps does not scare you”. Quite the contrary, "you are deeply invested in who you are, you don't forget who you are or where you come from", so working with other genres "what it does is fill it with details that enlarge your way of expressing yourself".
In the expression of flamenco, dancing has a special role, which leads the one from San Fernando to affirm that she does not feel like just a dancer, “I also feel like a musician in the way of tapping, it is a way of playing percussion”. This is reflected in the creation of the shows, which she prepares herself together with the musical director, Keko Baldomero, "there are things that we create at the same time, movement and music, choreography and music go hand in hand." All this planning must take into account an apparently contradictory element such as improvisation, the essence of flamenco whose execution requires a technique "that needs a lot of study", although at the moment of truth "you have to forget about that technique, let yourself carried by what you feel, and you can only do that with music that accompanies you”.
“The cantaor cannot improvise if the one who dances does it in a mathematical way”, he elaborates, emphasizing that “there is a game that forms part of our art that is one of the things that makes it so special, the fact that we all go to one, and that improvisation is in the music and the dance”. In the case of his company, this implies the existence of a skeleton “where everything is very well assembled and studied” precisely to give rise to those moments of improvisation “where we let ourselves be carried away by what we feel”. In this sense, he highlights the importance of getting to know each other so much after years of working together, which allows him to share moments "that seems as if we were a jazz group, in which there is a musical base and we are playing there, and I as if I were a musician also because I answer him or he answers me”.
The secret for this combination to work is clear to Sara Bras: her company, founded in 1998, a private organization that maintains itself from a public that has responded all along. “When I look back, I feel very proud because we have never let our guard down,” she explains, and highlights as an ingredient for success the fact that “this company has never stopped, and it is something that has made us have a fantastic connection and union since a long time ago".
