He settled in Madrid at the age of 16, when the Nuevo Arte Español company called him, and that was 23 years ago. But Jesús Carmona already wanted to dance flamenco as a child in his native Badalona. The drive did not come from family or environment. His was a natural outburst that teachers like Sonia Poveda, Miguel's sister, knew how to encourage. And watching him dance at the Teatre Victòria you understand that organic relationship between flamenco art and his feeling.
Carmona, National Dance Prize 2020 – “he saved me from macaroni and tomato, because we were at the last” – and Benois de la Danse 2021 (the Oscar of dance), has the gift of fusing music with every inch of your body. His vocabulary is very faithful to tradition and perhaps draws on Farruco, Antonio el Bailarín, Lola Flores... but he is capable of sublimating the most pop beat, that energy that, he says, Michael Jackson had, because "he was very flamenco and many of the flamencos have taken their positions.” “Yes, those positions of his that make you shout ‘olé!’”
Baile de bestias, the solo with which he arrives in Barcelona until October 1, is the second part of an “involuntary” trilogy of self-knowledge that he entered into with his previous El Salto. “My latest shows are helping me get to know myself and that need for self-knowledge is what is making me grow and connect in a much more direct way with the public. Yes, since I am conscious, authentic and real with my movement, and since I work to search for myself first before anyone else, I feel that a much stronger connection channel with the public has been opened,” he emphasizes.
With El Salto – a co-production of London's Sadlers Wells and the Seville Flamenco Biennial – he understood, he says, that “I had a wrong masculinity and that I had to create my own.” “I saw that those words of masculinity and femininity make less and less sense in the society in which we live. And this made me understand myself and have a healthier masculine, although I still make mistakes. I think we are in a very beautiful moment for self-masculinity. To understand that you have the right to create your own and feel happy and proud of it.”
With this Beast Dance he has now learned to manage the beasts, “all those situations that sometimes overwhelm you, so that you can respect yourself for not having been able to prevent the glass from overflowing and learn to empty it.” He has, he assures, a message of positivity and rebirth. “That I come out better and stronger from these situations.” The trilogy would, thus, be a search for the limits of his personality, which he defines as shameful. “Yes, it is quite difficult for me to be in social groups,” the artist whom The New York Times describes as a “phenomenon” confesses to La Vanguardia.
Dance of beasts has earned him two Max, for best dance show and best choreography. And the staging oozes a lack of financial injection and perhaps putting itself in the hands of good stage direction. Side by side with the composer Manu Masaedo, who accompanies him playing more than 20 instruments, Carrasco surrenders to his demons, goes into the forest, flours himself from the waist up and then cleans himself like someone leaving a duel..., but above all he lets himself be carried away by music, because that is where he vibrates with the frequency of greatness. What difference does it make if the rest of the production is not up to par with it. His alone will remain for posterity.
