Terebrante

Flamenco, I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve suffered a lot. If you haven’t suffered, how will you suffer in flamenco? To be flamenco, one needs to have a cause. Here, now, this is empty, there’s no cause. What’s the cause? First you have to be with a woman you love. And then you leave her or she leaves you. And there you have the suffering and the moan If you don’t have a cause, why would you sing?

Manuel de los Santos, Agujetas

Angelica Liddell probes suffering in her new show, Terebrante. She does it appealing to the cantaor, Manuel Agujetas, and his existential pain, the essence of flamenco. “If you haven’t suffered, what flamenco are you going to sing?”, declared the Jerez-born artist, died last year. The biggest suffering is caused by terebrant pain, “a pain”, affirms Liddell, “capable of destroying the world’s breast”, as if someone were drilling into the centre of a stab wound. This pain is expressed through the seguiriya,the primitive and tragic chant of flamenco.