lo real/le reel/the real

Galván puts it like this: ‘My work leads me to dance the impossible, transforming into dance and flamenco those gestures, experiences, stories, emotions and experiments that don’t belong to me.’ In his latest creation Lo Real he again combines flamenco with contemporary dance and music with great virtuosity, eluding flamenco clichés and establishing a whole new flamenco vocabulary. Lo Real is based on a true story: the persecution of the Roma by the Nazis, and the fascination of the same Nazis for music of the Roma. In her film Tiefland (1942), Leni Riefenstal played a flamenco dancer, joined in the movie by Roma extras from a concentration camp, most of whom were later killed in the gas chambers.

Galván struggles with this unbearable contradiction through dance and music: Anthony and the Johnsons, ‘Los Piconeros’, from the German film Andalusische Nächte, and The Death Tango by Eduardo Blanco. And of course traditional gypsy music, and flamenco music. In Lo Real, Galván dances the undanceable.