Flamenco after Franco: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Performances of Memory in Post-Dictatorial Spain

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Flamenco is one of the most popular forms of expressive culture from Spain. It is practiced all over the world and, as illustrated by its incorporation into UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010, it has already become shared international heritage. However, flamenco is still largely absent from wider academic and social debates about the most influential and as yet unresolved episode in Spain's recent history: the Franco-dictatorship (1939-1975). While there are well-known flamenco songs and interviews that refer verbally to the hardships and repression under Franco suffered by different artists, these experiences are not yet visible outside of the flamenco community. Furthermore, to date no substantial research has been done on how memories of the Franco-era are expressed not only verbally -such as through the lyrics of a song- but also in non-verbal aspects of song, dance and other embodied practices. This research gap is all the more remarkable, given that flamenco is widely understood as an expression of the experiences of poverty, persecution and repression suffered by the poor underclasses in southern Spain since the 17th century. If this is true, how, then, did flamenco help artists articulate much more recent experiences of persecution, repression and forced displacement under the Franco-dictatorship? Especially now that the unresolved legacy of the Franco-dictatorship is widely debated in politics, society, the media and academia while flamenco artists who survived the dictatorship are ageing and dying, it is urgent for scholars, artists and international audiences to understand how flamenco has been a medium to remember and cope with violent and traumatic experiences from the Franco-era. This project will create a pioneering and interdisciplinary Flamenco and Memory Network with scholars, artists and members of the international culture industry to examine how memories of the Franco-dictatorship have been expressed through flamenco, and to find strategies to raise awareness of these memories both in Spain and internationally. In the first year of the project, two workshops will be organised in two capitals of flamenco in southern Spain. At Workshop 1 in Granada, the PI, Co-I, flamenco artists and local researchers will collate oral histories to establish in what ways the lives and artistic practices of the flamenco community were impacted by the Franco-dictatorship. Workshop 2 in Seville will explore more specifically how flamenco has been a medium for an older generation of artists to give embodied expression to their memories of the dictatorship, and how flamenco can continue to be a medium for younger artists to engage with the unresolved legacy of the Franco-dictatorship. In the second year, a third and final workshop will be organised at the University of Manchester to explore how artistic expressions of memory in flamenco can best be approached from a transnational perspective. We will invite international specialists of memory, music and performance and directors of leading cultural festivals to explore the following questions: In what ways can music and performance be helpful to deal with painful memories? How should non-verbal expressions of memory be addressed in wider scholarly and public debates about the unresolved legacy of the Franco-dictatorship? What roles should these memories have in the transmission of flamenco to performers and audiences across the globe? Contributions of all three workshops will be audio-recorded and made available on a project website with transcripts in both English and Spanish. The project will also lead to an artistic performance and to the publication of a Flamenco and Memory Network Report, that will be circulated to relevant cultural and political institutions. Finally, the academic outputs of this project will be published in a special issue on flamenco and memory in a leading international journal of performance studies.