Yinka Esi Graves might seem like a rare bird. Until recently, she herself wondered what an Afro-descendant Englishwoman with roots in Ghana like her was painting, developing herself in an artistic discipline such as flamenco dancing. But the answer was in her own body. She tells it in an academic Spanish that she has learned in her years in Madrid and now in Seville.
“I took my first classes in England, when I was at the University and it was a bodily experience. I very much believe in the intelligence of the body and there was something that called me and that gave me the need to investigate, to come to Spain. And it's incredible but on this trip I've come across people and places where Afro-descendant creation in flamenco is recognized”. The artist had danced dances from Senegal and in Cuba, Afro-Cuban dances, "and I felt those dances in my body doing flamenco."
When he moved to Seville, he met the Jerez-born anthropologist and filmmaker Miguel Ángel Rosales, who was making his documentary Gurumbé, about the black memory left by slaves in Andalusia. "That legitimized me, it wasn't so strange that I was interested in this dance," he says.
At the Grec he already performed last year with Concha Buika, but this time he is presenting his first solo production: The Disappeareing Act, a postcolonial claim on the invisibility of those who are different. And he does it through the character of Olga Brown, a figure that appears in Degas' painting that recounts the world of the circus: Miss La La to Cirque Fernando.
