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The cuadro flamenco is a brilliant dilution of the Andalusian dance. Flamenco means Flemish, and is applied strictly to Andalusia. The use harks back to the age of Carlos I and Felipe II when Flanders was part of the Theodicy of Spain and the best will of Castile and the best blood of the south went into the wars with the Low Countries. It became Andalusia’s pride to share in this mad religious struggle.[10]
The cuadro is a “team” of perhaps two men guitarists, four women and one man dancer. The men are clad in trousers that rise like cylinders to a high black band above the waist. They wear white shirts and the coat (which is often absent) is cut in the front like our evening dress, and tailless. The women are soberly gowned. The shawl is brown or black. Only the slippers give a flare of red. The hat is the stiff sombrero ancho of the farmer whose more romantic, more flexible offshoot is our “cowboy Stetson.” The group sit in a half circle. The guitars thrum almost absently. The men and women seem to be examining one another. A woman rises and goes to the center of the group. She dances. The other women and the single man from their chairs with clapping of hand and foot-beat mark a skeletal obbligato.
To the more pigmented music and more volumnear forms of the other Andalusian dances, this dance bears the relation of a steel-engraving to an oil painting. It is a climax of the bare Castilian motif: the warrior will of the Reconquest which lived on, after the Moor had disappeared from Spain, in the Inquisition, in the Holy War against the Dutch, in the rapt butcheries of Mexico and Peru—in this flamenco. The dance makes saccade angles against the lush weave of the music. It is too graphic, too linear: it remains in the realm of draughtsmanship and drama.
The dancer does not move from her central square. Feet beat intricate tattoos, the body is poised stiffly, the head turns, arms swerve up and down in a sort of wistful memory of ease, while the fingers click an osseous pointillation that is a shadow of the castanets. The lyrical release of the arms is held to the verge of vanishment. The guitars make a music like dry wind in autumn trees. The maternal verdure of the women, fixed in their chairs, is sacrificed wholly to the stripped will of the dance. One thinks of fields turned into the desert of Castile. The fertile and the pagan are almost gone. And the protagonist of the flamenco is a man.
He comes from his chair only after each woman has danced and has retired. He is short, neither stout nor slender; there is no gallantry about him. His face and his dark body are stamped with seriousness. He has watched the women through their arid figures with eyes like the eyes of a master. He is no lover: he is the priest of a rite. Now, he stands moveless within the weave of the music. Sudden, his feet break in a shattering tattoo from which his body rises in subtle suppressed waves. Even the lyric holiday of the arms is absent from his dance. They are still at his side, or they are held in fixity near the shoulder. The body is vised; the head does not swerve. Feet and legs make a dance, perpendicular and juiceless: bereft of rhetoric and gesture, they bespeak the hoof-beat of armies, the vigils of the desert, the absolute symbol of the Arab Darwish. All of Spain that is not this male message of Castile has been crushed out....
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The distinction of flamenco is only of degree. The Andalusian dance is impersonal and abstract. All the movements of the soul and body of an intricate race are essenced here into a ruthless form. The appolonian is channeled; the dionysian is mastered; the dramatic is cleansed of episode; the lyrical is exploited as a mere carrier of life to sculptured unity.
The Andalusian dance is the converse of the art of the Russian ballet in which the pure materials of plastic movement are exteriorized and denatured into the melodramatic. In the Russian dance, the means is the art; the end is the personal, the pathetic. The Russian dance is analytic, episodic, realistic. The Spanish dance is organic and essential. It is the one great classic dance surviving in our modern world.