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Camarón always wanted to be a torero (as did Aurelio). Last year we had a great corrida in the little Plaza de San Fernando with Ruiz Miguel and David Galván ( both from San Fernando, maestro y alumno) with cante y toque de los jóvenes de la familia de Camarón.
After reading the interview with Aurelio that Ricardo posted in the Montoya discussion, I looked around Brook Zern's very interesting site and came across this item that he translated from an article in a Spanish paper:
Flamenco and the bullfight are two artistic expressions that have always been united, and it’s not possible to understand either one without understanding the other, say the torero Juan José Padilla and the flamenco singer José Mercé.
[...] “Flamenco without the bullfight, and the bullfight without flamenco, cannot be understood,” José Mercé told EFE, Spain’s national news agency, adding that the two disciplines are “las mayores culturas” [the major cultural expressions; or, possibly, the oldest cultural expressions] of the nation, with numerous points of encounter.
In the same vein, the torero Juan José Padilla assured the audience that one cannot understand a good bullfight without the “flamenco foundation” [fondo flamenco] that accompanies it, and stated that a siguiriya or a soleá sung by Mercé serves as an inspiration for a bullfighter.
Brook Zern comments:
"...for better or worse, José Mercé and Sr. Padilla are not wrong. The bullfight illuminates flamenco, and vice versa, to such an extent that neither can be fully understood independently. I won’t try to elaborate on this mysterious fact (beyond hinting that death, an unfashionable and un-American concept that Spain still understands, lurks at the core of both.)
It is not necessary to love or like bullfighting to comprehend an essential aspect of flamenco. It may even be okay to hate the bullfight. But first, it is necessary to pay some attention to the bullfight, Spain’s other emblematic phenomenon, and try to understand it within its original cultural context."
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