LA MIRI

June 2004

The following is an interweaving of Miriam Phillip s professional bio, augmented by personal narrative and responses to topical questions initiated by Jason Engelund.

Miriam Phillips La Miri is director of the school, La Miri Flamenco Dance, and the performance ensemble, AZAFRÁN Flamenco based in Marin County. She is a dance teacher, performer and ethnologist with over two decades of experience in flamenco, and a wide range of experience in the world of dance at large. As a flamenco professional she has studied with the illustrious Gypsy maestro, El Farruco and his daughters La Faraona and La Farruquita, an important flamenco family whom she has known for over 15 years. She has also studied with masters at the famed Estudio Amor de Dios in Madrid including, Ciro, El Güito and Carmela Greco, and in Seville with Manuela Carrasco, Angelita Vargas and Carmelilla Montoya. Ms. Phillips performed as a dance soloist in Israel, Spain and the United States and danced in TV commercials and music videos for U.S., Mexican and Spanish programming. In San Francisco she was a member of the company of the late Cruz Luna, and soloist in the second (or third) generation of Los Flamencos de la Bodega when it moved from North Beach s Old Spaghetti Factory to the El Greco in the Cannery. In Los Angeles she worked in the companies of Roberto Amaral and Linda Vega. While a graduate student at UCLA, she received three University Creative grants, in 1999 she was awarded a Marin Arts Council grant for Choreography, and in 2003 she was invited to perform for the opening night of the Latino Film Festival.

I've been involved in the Bay Area flamenco scene for a long time, but the last several years I have worked more quietly in my own community, which is Marin County. Until recently, I had taken a break from performing to focus more on teaching and researching flamenco. I started flamenco at the Old Spaghetti Factory shortly before it closed its doors. The great singer/dancer, Isa Mura (mother of Yaelisa) was my first flamenco teacher; bohemian sculptor and flamenco impresario, Richard Whalen, gave me and a lot of other flamencos our first tablao jobs. I left the Bay Area for nearly ten years to pursue graduate degrees in dance, return to Spain, and to teach at a number of universities. I returned in the mid-1990s.

When people ask me if I have Spanish blood, I say, no, I m Jewish. I've noticed many Jews, women in particular, are drawn to flamenco, and I think there is something similar in the passionate, expressive cultures of the two. Certainly there is a shared heritage of pain; an affinity with the oppressed. I know my Gypsy friends, when I first told them that I was Jewish, embraced me for this reason.

How did I get into flamenco? It was actually via kathak dance. As a teenager I was a devout student of North Indian classical dance and singing, as well as yoga (long before it was a fad). But as I was about to cross the border into my twenties, something inside me became very restless. Kathak is a beautifully complex and rich art form with many movement similarities to flamenco, yet its aesthetic is softer; it s about transcendence and a kind of self-less- ness . The movements are more contained and refined than flamenco. After years of practicing this discipline, something in

me needed to burst out of this more demure approach. That was when someone invited me to my first flamenco performance. I flipped. I immediately began private lessons with Isa at the Factory. She was so intense (on top of flamenco being so intense), I had to break my vegetarianism and start drinking espresso just to get through my lessons.

Right at this same time I was just about to finish my undergraduate degree in modern dance and choreography at Mills College and I was working on a grant application for the Watson Fellowship to study dance in India and Israel. I wanted to go to a third country, so when I first saw flamenco, I knew Spain would be it. What I did not know was how I was going to convince this foundation of why I needed to dance in these three countries. I could feel in my body the similarities between kathak and flamenco, but I had to do a lot of research to write that proposal. Without knowing it, that was the start of my research into the relationship between kathak and flamenco. I discovered ways in which three disparate countries were linked culturally via its people, and these discoveries garnered me a three year grant to live and study dance in India, the Middle East and Spain. It was a tremendous gift. Needless to say, I had many awesome adventures, and these years lay the foundation for my work as a dancer and ethnologist.

Miriam is a trained Dance Ethnologist (UCLA) and Certified Laban Movement Analyst who has applied this training to performance and choreography, college and community teaching, researching and writing, and arts production and consulting. She has served on the faculties of UCLA, Cal Arts, the Laban Institute of Movement Studies, and Sonoma State University. In 1994 she was specifically invited to Wesleyan University in Connecticut as Visiting Assistant Professor to teach courses in modern dance, choreography, dance anthropology and flamenco. She has been a consultant on several multi-media projects on world dance and computer animation, including from Oxford, Compton and Pixar. In 1996 and 1997 she was Director of the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, curating sold-out performances, including the acclaimed: Hidden Treasures: Dance and Music Through the Islamic World, and Torchbearers and Innovators. In addition to performing and teaching community classes in Marin County, Miriam is currently a consultant and writer for the SF Ethnic Dance Festival, and an intermittent adjunct professor at Mills College.

Miriam has conducted fieldwork in Spain, India and the Middle East on Thomas J. Watson, Del Amo and American Institute for Indian Studies (AIIS) fellowships. A long-standing project is a book and performance exploring the movement, aesthetic and cultural relationships between kathak and flamenco. This project is a further development of her well recognized thesis: Both Sides of the Veil: A Comparative Analysis of North Indian Kathak and Spanish Flamenco Dance.

What is a dance ethnologist? It is someone who is so curious about why a dance is the way it is, and wants to know so badly how it got to be that way, that they are willing to put themselves into all kinds of awkward situations to find out. More seriously, the discipline is a kind of marriage between dance and anthropology, but it is much more focused on dance as the central reinforcer and revealer of culture. Ethnology includes history, but it is more than history because its about a living event and discovering meaning. We do it through participant/observation of all sorts of dance happenings, interviews and dancing.

As a dance ethnologist I have had the opportunity to take my many late night rompings with the flamencos and turn them into journal articles. One such time occurred in the middle of my graduate school training where I spent nearly three months with members of the Flamenco Puro tour, particularly the Farruco family. After the show, we would go back to the hotel to make dinner. Practically every night a rowdy fiesta would break out in the men s quarter. Fifteen people crammed into a tiny hotel room, whiskey bottles being passed, dancers singing, singers playing guitar, guitarists dancing, forthcoming propositions negotiated between vivacious Gypsy men and beautiful American women. The concierge would call the room five times in one night asking us to

keep it down, but it was impossible. Once the flamenco fever hit (and the whiskey), they were uncontrollable! I would leave my Gitano friends to sleep while I drove across town to the university as the sun was rising. The irony was that I was driving to Spanish class. I missed so many classes that semester I had to fess up to the teacher as to what I was doing and she agreed to pass me after I gave a presentation on flamenco. That period led to a couple of articles, including: The Trained and the Natural Gypsy Flamenco Dancer appearing in 100 Years of Gypsy Studies.

What is a Laban movement analyst? This is harder to explain. It is someone who is simultaneously impassioned by the expressive power of movement and anal compulsive about being able to understand it enough to describe it in words and symbols. More seriously, the Laban Movement System recognizes that all movement is multi-dimensional, and the way a person moves is expressive of their inner motivations and drives. The training has many applications for teaching, performing arts, fitness, sports, therapy and writing. The name of the system is somewhat misleading because it is actually very grounded in the experience of moving. The training is as much physically demanding as it is mentally and emotionally. This training led to certain key discoveries in my work on kathak and flamenco; it has allowed me to see things that I would not otherwise be able to see.

How do these studies interact with my flamenco dancing? I have to dance in order to comprehend what I am researching, and I have to know what I am dancing otherwise it is meaningless and I am just a body going through the motions. What connects me to this culture that is not my own? Understanding, via the research, helps me as a dancer to connect to the spirit of a heritage, and dancing enlivens my research because there is a knowing through the body that is unlike any other kind of knowing.

What draws me personally to flamenco? Its unabashed expression of human emotion. Its refreshing directness. The immediacy of emotion. It challenges you to be fully embodied. It s about dis- covering yourself, or as they say in Spain, finding yourself (encontrarse en el arte). It s about meeting yourself authentically, and about giving that discovery to those around you. Flamenco is about playing in the moment with your fellow musicians and audience. It s about seizing the spirit running through everyone and creating new energy each time. Flamenco is not overtly spiritual like classical Indian dance is, -- but THIS is spiritual!

I mentioned that I started out as a kathak dancer. While I no longer perform kathak, I still keep in close contact with my teacher and take workshops with him when possible for the purpose of aiding my research. I first studied kathak with a couple of teachers in the U.S. including Chitresh Das, the acclaimed Bay Area kathak master. I was very young when I first went to India. Alone, I walked into a studio of a very great master and began to weep in his presence because of the depth of artistry and expression I saw in his students and their connection to him. He took me under his wing and gave me his closest disciple to work with. That was, and still remains, my kathak guru, Birju Maharaj, who is like the El Farruco of kathak dance, only his lineage goes back seven generations to the kathak masters of the Moghul courts of North India. The history of flamenco isn t even that old! Maharaji, as we call him, has had a very profound impact on my flamenco dancing. It s hard for even me to put into words. He has taught me much about the expressive nature of rhythm, the mood behind even the smallest movement, the power of the eyes, and humility to the art. Since this is a flamenco page, I will refrain from telling stories about the many years I have traveled and sat at the feet of this great Indian master.

But, you asked me to comment on my kathak and flamenco work. Basically, I m looking at the similarities and distinctions between the two forms. I m interested in how they can have so many movement similarities, such as footwork and rhythms, arm movements, body positions, phrasing and choreographic structure, yet be so aesthetically and philosophically opposite. What are my favorite findings? There is one in particular that sums it up and that is the title of my original thesis, Both Sides of the Veil. In kathak it is as if you are dancing BEHIND a veil, and in some cases you literally are, the ghunghat is a veil. The way the arms are held in front of the body, the aesthetics of concealing the body, the face, the goal to transcend one self, and so forth. In flamenco it is as if you are dancing IN FRONT of a veil. In this case it could literally be a manton or shawl. The arms are held slightly behind the body. It is about revealing yourself, embodying yourself. Curiously, there are many arm positions that are the same in kathak as in flamenco, but one has them slightly in front of the torso, the other behind. The arms are a metaphor for the veil, the veil is a metaphor for the relationship to self (I m still working on this one). So my research is less about historical facts, and more about the actual dance and the embodied experience both mine and the artists I interview and observe. There is however, one of my history articles now available on the internet. You can get there by going to the World Arts West site: http:// www.worldartswest.org/plm/guide/locator/KFHistory1991.pdf.

In 2001 and 2002 I had the opportunity to return to both India and Spain to do serious fieldwork again. My goals were to re- experience culture shock from one country to the other and to cull information from that experience. But more importantly, I really wanted to hear the dancing experience from the artists themselves. We did some incredibly moving interviews where either I or the artist (or both) were moved to tears. I had support in India to get kathak tapes transcribed, but the flamenco tapes sit in a box. So if there is anyone out there who has exceptional Spanish (Andalusian) skills who can translate and transcribe some of these tapes, it s a great opportunity to learn a lot about the philosophy and values of flamenco culture. I have three generations of the Farruco family, two of the Galvans, Christina Hoyos, Manuela Carrasco, Matilde Coral, Calixto Sanchez, Carmela Greco, Milagros Menjibar, and a host of others.

You asked me to comment on flamenco s power to evoke response from performer and audience in big theaters as well as flamenco folk in informal late night settings. And you also asked me my thoughts on duende. All huge topics. Once we get access to my very first published article to post on your website, I address both of these areas including interviews of flamencos on their thoughts on duende. Where the Spirit Roams: Toward an Understanding of Duende in Two Flamenco Dance Contexts. Here I actually compare duende (I love comparisons) in the juerga versus theatrical setting.

La Miri Flamenco Dance is a community-based school established in Marin County in 1996. It offers on-going classes and workshops in traditional flamenco dance, choreography and improvisation in the context of flamenco's rich historical and cultural heritage. Miri's teaching approach is student-centered. It enables students to readily access and express flamenco's form and spirit.

AZAFRAN FLAMENCO is a music and dance ensemble made up of a revolving cast of dynamic Bay Area performing artists under the direction of Marin County teacher, Miriam "La Miri".

"Azafran" (derived from Arabic) is the Spanish word for "saffron." As each individual saffron thread mixes together with other ingredients to create warming, colorful and zestful flavors, AZAFRAN FLAMENCO extends to audiences a taste of the power, passion and spirit of Spanish flamenco in a warm and inclusive atmosphere.

I m into accessible flamenco. I feel that part of my work is about empowering people through movement; facilitating people to connect sprit to body their spirit to their life. What better way than flamenco. So I offer different kinds of classes from a flamenco workout to more in-depth choreography, performance and improvisation classes, and occasionally history and culture workshops. I don t want my students to dance like me, I want them to dance like themselves. And that is a courageous act.

In performance, I m into creating a space where people are invited into the mood of what is going on they can come into the warmth, the vibrancy, even the anguish of what we create. I like working with lots of different kinds of people to discover the unique synergies created. Hence, the metaphor of saffron, and the mixing of individual threads and ingredients to create different flavors.

Like any art, flamenco is always evolving. I have witnessed a lot of change over the years. Not only has the vocabulary and technique changed, but the style, philosophy and values as well. The foundation of my flamenco dance training was with a certain generation of artist who had a certain philosophy. Part of that philosophy has to do with the form and technique being there to serve the feelings and the personality coming through the dancer. Maestro Farruco and his lineage are proponents of this school. In my first trip to Spain I saw Enrique El Cojo perform shortly before he passed this earth. He was so old and fat, and really Cojo, that he had to be lifted from his chair by two people and carried down stage. Left alone in the middle of the proscenium of the huge Teatro Lope de Vega in Sevilla, the Soleares began. All he did was lift his arm in four compases and the audience stood up cheering and weeping. Such a simple movement that he did with such grace, such style, such arte, that it really touched people even three tiers up. Somehow that picture really became etched in my memory.