Eduardo Serrano, ‘El Güito’, legend of flamenco dancing, dies | Culture | EUROtoday

Flamenco dance has maybe misplaced the final of the pillars that sustained and illuminated it within the second half of the twentieth century. Eduardo Serrano Iglesias The Güito He died on Wednesday afternoon on account of a short however critical sickness. He died within the hospital in Villalba (Madrid), town to which he moved from his neighborhood of La Concepción when he deserted instructing on the Academia Amor de Dios, the place he taught for a few years. Precisely, it was its director, Joaquín San Juan, who confirmed the loss of life of the artist to this newspaper.

The dancer was born within the Madrid neighborhood of El Rastro in 1942 and, from a really younger age, he already confirmed his creative talents: when he was solely 5 years previous he received his first competitors and, whereas nonetheless a toddler, he put his dance in a number of movies within the early Nineteen Fifties. . He had a self-taught coaching, watching artists—amongst them Farruco, his first reference—within the colmaos and tablaos, the place his mom labored as a match woman, earlier than getting into the academy of Antonio Marín, “the lame man from Madrid who threw out “walk the modern dance”, in the words of flamenco expert producer and writer José Manuel Gamboa. He would end up being a repeater when the teacher’s leg was amputated.

His career would change radically when, at only fourteen years old, he joined Pilar López’s company, which would make his debut in London. The dancer would always acknowledge that he learned everything from her: “To be respectful, punctuality, to dress, what a stage was, choreography, what it was to dance as a man…”. The instructor reciprocated in honest measure and thus, in 1988, she declared to the journal Flamenco Seville that “[El Güito] It was like the earth itself. A force, a root so strong that it already rises to the sky.” He remained together with her till 1959, the 12 months during which, performing with Doña Pilar’s firm, he could be topped on the Theater of Nations in Paris as “the best dancer of the season”, a diploma that the artist has stored like gold. .

The Parisian distinction catapulted him to start his solo profession, performing in tablaos and touring overseas. He later participated in reveals akin to The Tarantos, by Rovira Veleta, and collaborated with the dancer Manuela Vargas within the Flamenco dramatic anthology, earlier than, at the start of the seventies, he fashioned a partnership with Mario Maya and Carmen Mora to type the well-known Trío Madrid, with a renewed dance idea and a format that will discover continuity 4 years later, already with the dancer Antonia Martínez.

It was at the moment that his soleá dance was consolidated and gained brilliance, which might turn out to be an emblem of his work and the canon of males’s dancing. The dancer admitted his predilection and identification with that type in 1996 when, in an interview with Monika Bellido (El Olivo Magazine)declared: “It has been the dance that has consecrated me to be what I am (…) It is where I feel best, most at ease. It gives me more pleasure, because it is where you can dance more slowly.” However, this might not be the one type during which he would stand out: his farruca is acknowledged, as is his solemn cane or his sober seguiriya, types that at this time represent unquestionable examples of classical males’s dance.

Already within the eighties, along with appearing as a visitor artist of the National Ballet, he offered his first personal reveals and visited the principle occasions and festivals just like the determine he’s. His in depth and wealthy profession from starting to finish spans greater than half a century and is an exponent of flamenco dance and lifetime of a complete period. They say that in his final years he was considerably forgetful, that’s the reason, and in order that a lot historical past wouldn’t be misplaced, José Manuel Gamboa acted as a form of corkscrew of recollections to, “with the mnemonic collaboration of Joaquín San Juan and the teachers José de la Vega and Emilio de Diego”, stand up and (re)construct their experiences in the book The head of flamenco. Facts and works of the teacher Eduardo Serrrano ‘El Güito’, which, with his personal style, he subtitled as MP-Repaired memories of a forgetful reedbed. Almost four hundred pages of exhaustive information to travel for a long time.

The dance of El Güito, due to its refined aesthetics, elegance and sobriety, has been of great influence on the dance of subsequent generations. Together with Antonio Gades and Mario Maya, they formed the unique trio that Doña Pilar proudly referred to as “my children.” He, in addition, after his retirement continued to transmit his wisdom, teaching at the Amor de Dios Dance Academy. And what cannot be ignored: for the time in which he lived, his dances are available on networks and platforms and are an object of worship for those who want to imbibe his art.

Defining it’s not a simple activity, that’s the reason it’s essential to go to the phrase of one other instructor, Professor José Luis Navarro García, who in his History of flamenco dance (Volume II), He condensed it masterfully: “His dance is the quintessence of Apollonian dance. Each movement is a sculptural attitude. It is a sober, slow, elegant and manly dance. A dance that lacks nothing and has nothing left over. A dance that has poise and elegance. And the precise decoration. A dance done slowly and with pleasure, listening and letting it be heard. A dance in which composure and positioning prevail, in which the arms, head and shoulders play a prominent role. With them, he builds figures with an old aesthetic. “El Güito imprints his personality on all the dances he performs.”