Antonio el Pipa

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Antonio el Pipa (real life Antonio Ríos Fernández ; born April 6, 1970 in Jerez de la Frontera ) is a Spanish flamenco dancer and choreographer .

Life

Childhood and youth

Antonio Ríos Fernández grew up in a Gitano family deeply rooted in flamenco . There was singing and dancing at home. His grandmother Tía Juana la del Pipa played a formative role in Jerez's flamenco scene. Juan de la Plata called her reina madre del baile de Jerez . Antonio saw dance as his destiny: "I had to be a dancer, it was like an order ..." From his grandmother Antonio learned the "little secrets of the dance of Jerez". He got on her nerves for so long, according to Antonio el Pipa, until she finally showed him that he should bring his arms open to Bulerías , but closed to Soleares .

Outside of the family environment, he trained with Angelita Gómez , Fernando Belmonte , Manolete , Matilde Coral and Manolo Marín .

Artistic beginnings and breakthrough to success

Antonio el Pipa had his first professional appearance in 1988, at the age of 18, in Manuel Morao's show Flamenco, esa forma de vivir . At the same time he took part in the Fiesta de la Bulería of Jerez. In 1989 he appeared in a performance as a member of Antonio Vargas' dance company in Georges Bizet's opera Carmen . In 1990 he danced in Sueños flamencos by Cristina Hoyos and in Pasión gitana by Manuel Morao. In 1992 he danced again in Yerma as a member of Cristina Hoyos' company. At the Expo 92 in Seville he danced in Manuel Morao's show Aire y compás in the Andalusian pavilion . In the same year he also appeared in Herejía de la llama by Luis Pérez Palacios and in Apología flamenca by La Tati . At the Seville Flamenco Biennale in 1994 he danced Jondo, la razón incorpórea , another show by Manuel Morao.

In 1995 he won two prizes at the national competition of Cordoba : the Paco Laberinto for Bulerías and Premio Juana la Macarrona for Alegrías . Since then he has been an essential participant in many festivals. That year he started work on Vivencias , his first choreography for his own company.

Performances, prizes, own works

In 1996 he appeared in Ricardo Franco's performance De joven arte flamenco at the Tanz 96 festival in Vienna . In 1997 he danced at the Festival de Música y Danza in Granada and together with Carmen Linares and Juan Carlos Romero in La Parrala . On February 16, 1997 his company made its debut with Vivencias at the Teatro Lope de Vega in Seville. He dedicated it to his grandmother, "the purity and sincerity of her dance and her life". It was a resounding success. After the world premiere, it was performed at the 1st Jerez Flamenco Festival and then on the most prestigious stages across Spain. The Circulo de Bellas Artes recorded Vivencias the Copa Pavón from; the Cátedra de Flamencología de Jerez awarded the piece with the Copa Jerez . Madrid Miguel Mora called it in El País in September 1997 the “most applauded flamenco performance of the last few months”.

In 1998 he danced in Huellas ... Antología de un tiempo , directed by José Luis Ortiz Nuevo at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville. The Tío José de Paula Association in Jerez awarded him their gold badge of honor. At the 15th competition in Cordoba, he presented Vivencias again . He has performed at festivals in a number of cities including Madrid, Jerez and Lyon. To top it off, he received the Premio de la Asociación Nacional de Críticos Flamencos at the end of the year .

In 1999 he presented Vivencias in Symphony Space in New York and in Théâtre Trianon in Paris. At the Jerez Festival in April 1999 he brought a new piece to the stage: Generaciones . The piece deals with the transmission of craftsmanship from generation to generation. He brought three generations onto the stage: the old one, represented by Matilde Coral , his own, represented by María del Mar Moreno , and the adolescent, embodied by ten-year-old Paloma Fantova. The ten-year-old especially got the audience excited with her leprechaun-like, courageous way of dancing. She dances neither like a child nor like an adult, but with convincing, moving naturalness, wrote Ángel Alvarez Caballero in a later review.

In addition to other appearances in Spain, he took part in a tour with the musical Caravana de Gitanos in North America in 1999 . There he represented the Spanish Kalé . The tour, organized by the World Music Institute in Manhattan , went through the US states of California, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Washington DC, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York and finally to Toronto, Canada.

In September 2000, on the occasion of the Seville Biennale, he premiered his next piece: Puntales deals with the four pillars of flamenco: singing, guitar, dance and clapping hands. Antonio el Pipa called it the most ambitious project of his career. For the first time he was choreographer and director of a large company at the same time, and for the first time he was showing a piece that didn't tell a story. He wanted to "flamencise" the concept of ballet and give it flavor. To this end, he hired graduates of his dance class, which he had taught at the Centro Andaluz de Danza , 23 dancers aged 16 to 18 years. He brought in María del Mar Moreno and Milagros Mengíbar as assistant solo artists . Juana la del Pipa, Luis Moneo , Manuel Tañé , Felipe del Moreno and Carmen la Cantarota took part as singers, José Luis Montón , Antonio Jero and Juan Moneo formed the guitar group and Luis de la Tota and Joaquín Flores supported the rhythm group by clapping their hands.

Otherwise the year 2000 was filled with appearances at festivals in Spain and abroad, including Havana and Brighton as well as tours through the Netherlands and Denmark. At the end of the year he received the Flamenco Hoy magazine award for best dancer. Together with Concha Vargas and Fernando Terremoto , he presented the best pieces from Vivencias , Generaciones and Puntales at the festival in Jerez the following year . In addition to appearing in Spanish cities, he toured the USA and Morocco .

Working since 2002

He presented his next piece, De “Cai”, el baile , in 2002 at the Jerez Festival. It tells of the contribution of the people of Cadiz to flamenco. It begins with the description of the seafaring from Havana, the source of many forms and rhythms of flamenco, to Cádiz. The caña , the farruca , the soleá por bulerías and the rondeña are danced . María José Franco and José Triguero accompanied Antonio el Pipa on this performance.

With the piece De la tierra at the Jerez Festival the following year, he returned to the themes of his first piece Vivencias : the encounter with the dance, the voices and the guitars of Jerez. He offered the Jerezanos and the visitors a Seguiriya , a Soleá por Bulería, Alegrías, a Soleá and a Cierre por Bulerías.

Pasión y ley , which he presented at the Jerez Festival in 2004, tells of his own artistic work, of the conflict between the passion for art and the necessities of daily work. With this piece he broke away from the traditional stylistic structure in favor of chronological progression. For the first time he used dancers in pairs. Lola Greco represented the passion, la pasión ; María José Franco embodied the law, la ley .

Antonio el Pipa brought De tablao to the stage in Vélez for the 2005 Malaga Biennale . The piece is dedicated to the history of tablaos , those small stage bars in which part of the development of flamenco took place. Without being historically exact, it offers a colorful bouquet of the pieces that made up the typical program of such a theater: Soleares, Tangos , a Taranto , a Seguiriya, Alegrías, Jaleos and of course Bulerías. María José Franco and Concha Vargas were again on stage as dancers. Juana la del Pipa contributed the vocals. After the world premiere, Antonio el Pipa also performed the piece internationally on a number of stages, including the Teatro Albéniz in Madrid, the City Center Theater in New York, Sadler's Wells in London, the Théâtre Chaillot in Paris, Volubilis in Morocco and the mexican guadalajara .

Two years later, at the 2007 Málaga Biennale, he presented Puertas adentro . In his own words, the piece is “an invitation to the audience to open themselves to my heart and identify with it.” The piece follows the poem Las tres heridas , The Three Wounds , by Miguel Hernández ; each of its three parts has a symbolic color: black for death, white for life and red for love. The bridge between them build two events in his life: the death of his mother and the birth of his child. This piece also offers a variety of different palos, with the Bulerías from Jerez dominating the scene. In his review of El País, Fermín Lobatón wrote that Antonio el Pipa had created a play in which feeling was combined with beautiful pictorial scenes and excellent artistic moments.

family

During an interview with El Mundo magazine , Antonio el Pipa said in 2007 that he was married and had three children.

dance

José Luis Navarro García characterizes Antonio el Pipa's style as graceful and empathetic, shaped by his hometown Jerez and its bodegas . It is personal and varied. Antonio el Pipa also knew how to incorporate elements of female dance into his style without losing its masculinity, seriousness and dignity.

Antonio el Pipa himself claims to be faithful to the Gitano dance in its pure and authentic form, free from artificiality and superfluous ornamentation. He respects the very latest trends that are emerging in flamenco, but rejects them for himself.

References and comments

  1. ↑ a b José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V. Signatura Ediciones de Andalucía, Sevilla 2010, ISBN 978-84-96210-88-2 , p. 47 .
  2. ↑ Queen Mother of the Dance of Jerez
  3. ↑ "Yo tenía que ser bailaor, era como que estaba mandao"
  4. ↑ a b José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 48 .
  5. ↑ José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 48-50 .
  6. ↑ José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 50 .
  7. ↑ «... a la pureza y la sencillez de su baile y de su vida»
  8. ^ A b Miguel Mora: "Antonio El Pipa: Al baile le sobra técnica y le falta pellizco". El artista jerezano presenta ‹Vivencias›, un homenaje al arte de los gitanos cortijeros. In: El País . September 18, 1997, accessed January 7, 2016 (Spanish).
  9. ↑ a b c José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 51 .
  10. ↑ Ángel Álvarez Caballero: Bailando con duendes jerezanos. In: El País. February 4, 2000, Retrieved January 7, 2016 (Spanish).
  11. ↑ a b c José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 53 .
  12. ↑ Strut
  13. ↑ «aflamencar»
  14. ↑ Alejandro Luque: El Pipa incorporará alumnos del Centro Andaluz de Danza en su próximo espectáculo. In: El País. March 24, 2000, Retrieved January 9, 2016 (Spanish).
  15. ↑ José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 54 .
  16. ^ Margot Molina: El Pipa estrena ‹Puntales›, su forma de entender el baile flamenco. In: El País. September 24, 2000, accessed January 9, 2016 (Spanish).
  17. ↑ José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 54-55 .
  18. ↑ a b José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 55 .
  19. ↑ José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 55-56 .
  20. ↑ Ángel Álvarez Caballero: Bailar entre dos mujeres. In: El País. October 6, 2004, accessed January 9, 2016 (Spanish).
  21. ↑ José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 56-57 .
  22. ↑ a b Antonio el Pipa. In: El Mundo . January 19, 2007, accessed January 9, 2016 (Spanish, interview with Antonio el Pipa on the occasion of a performance of De tablao ).
  23. ↑ "una invitación a que el público se asome a mi corazón y se sienta identificado"
  24. ↑ José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 57-58 .
  25. ^ Fermín Lobatón: Un espacio interior. In: El País. August 28, 2007, accessed January 9, 2016 (Spanish).
  26. ↑ José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume V, S. 58 .
  27. ↑ Biografía. Trayectoria Profesional. (No longer available online.) In: Antonio el Pipa's own website. Antonio el Pipa, archived from the original on March 24, 2016 ; Retrieved January 9, 2016 (Spanish). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.antonioelpipa.com

Web links

personal data
SURNAME El Pipa, Antonio
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ríos Fernández, Antonio (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish flamenco dancer and choreographer
DATE OF BIRTH April 6, 1970
PLACE OF BIRTH Jerez de la Frontera