At GALA’s Fuego Flamenco, a Dance of Life and Loss
D.C.’s flamenco ambassador Edwin Aparicio honors three local artists with a world premiere exploring the journey from birth to death.
The great thing about working with the GALA Hispanic Theatre to present the annual Fuego Flamenco Festival, says festival co-founder Edwin Aparicio, “is that they give me the liberty to be, in a way, the artist that I want to be.”
For Aparicio, a recognized master of the dance, that entails curating the Fuego Flamenco program from works selected by GALA’s directors, as well as staging new work each year with his Flamenco Aparicio Dance Company.
GALA doesn’t “ask of me parameters as to what it is that I’m going to present,” he says, adding, “I’ll have an idea at the beginning of the year, let’s say January for next year’s festival. And I usually have been creating lately with my husband. So I run an idea by him. And that, in a way, is how I start my creative process.”
Aparicio and husband Aleksey Kulikov, a former dancer, teamed as co-directors for this year’s Flamenco Aparicio production, Entre dos sombras. A world premiere contemporary dance, the work, which Aparicio calls “very personal to me,” pays homage to three artists the D.C. creative community lost this year: married flamenco pioneers Ana Martínez and Paco de Málaga, and Salvadoran photographer Muriel Hasbun.
“I was actually going to do a different production this year,” Aparicio notes. “And because of these events that happened throughout the beginning of the year, I said, ‘I want to pay tribute to these artists.’”
Martínez, a dancer, and Málaga, a guitarist, were in their 80s. “They were actually the ones that put flamenco on the map [in D.C.] back in the day,” says Aparicio. Early in his dance career, he toured with Martínez, “and I learned a lot from her on stage, how to be present, how to deal with live musicians and stuff like that.”
She and Málaga passed away within a few weeks of each other earlier this year. “They were always together,” Aparicio says. “He was her guitarist, until the end.”
Salvadoran photographer and artist Hasbun died this spring of ovarian cancer. She had recently collaborated with Flamenco Aparicio on the company’s production El Salvador. “I’ve worked with her a lot,” Aparicio recalls. “We used a lot of her imagery and photography, and she was very inspirational when creating some of my pieces.”
Aparicio brought some of that inspiration to Entre dos sombras, which explores birth, life, and death as a journey from darkness to light back to darkness. (The title translates to Between two Darknesses, or Shadows.)
As Aparicio puts it, “What’s in between — it’s a moment, right? So we’re starting with that concept. So then, other than just a tribute to them, I wanted to explore what that means to be in that moment in between, that is our lives, where we are now, you and me now. That’s what I’m exploring.”
Flamenco, which can dance and sing through a spectrum of emotions — from a lullaby to a lament to cries of joy, Aparicio points out — is an ideal vehicle for that exploration. “So from birth, what happens at birth? That first scream when you’re born,” he says, painting the picture.
“And then when you die, what happens then? That last scream that you hear, or you don’t hear. Those cries, those laments. And flamenco lends itself very beautifully to this concept of life and death. It’s very deep when it comes to that. I’m lucky, actually, to be exploring this subject in flamenco.”
The XXII Fuego Flamenco Festival runs through Nov. 22 (La Velada, 5-8; Entre dos Sombras, 13-15; Danzas Solemnes, 20-22) at GALA Hispanic Theatre, 3333 14th St. NW. Single tickets are $25 to $50, with discounts for Seniors, Military, Groups 10+, and Patrons Under 25. An all-show Festival Pass is $120. Call 202-234-7174 or visit galatheatre.org.
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