The Flamenco Academy

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, two young women become entranced by young flamenco guitarist Toms ̀Montenegro and decide to dedicate themselves to the disciplines and demands of the university's flamenco academy.

Two girls with problematic lives, take flamenco lessons from a dashing Latin guitarist and both fall in love, with the same man!.

The language of the body is central to the study of flamenco. From the records of the Inquisition, to 16th century literature, to European travel diaries, the Spanish dancer beguiles and fascinates. The word flamenco evokes the image of a sensuous and rebellious woman--the bailaora --whose movements seduce the audience, only to reject their attention with a stomp of defiance. The dancer's body is an agent of ideological resistance, conveying a conflicting desire for subjectivity and autonomy and implying deeply held ideas about history, national identity, femininity and masculinity. This collection of new essays provides an overview of flamenco scholarship, illuminating flamenco's narrative and chronology and addressing some common misconceptions. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on age-old themes and suggest new paradigms for flamenco as a cultural practice. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Flamenco Explained, The Guitarist's Survival Guide, is the first book that breaks down the inner workings of flamenco and helps the guitarist truly understand this this amazing art form. Flamenco Explained presents the underlying architecture of flamenco in a new way that is accessible to all musicians and prepares the aspiring guitarist to accompany flamenco dance and Cante and communicate with other flamenco musicians. Flamenco Explained has already been used as the foundation for Berklee College of Music's first ever flamenco guitar class.

A collection of 150 black and white photographs following the San Francisco-based dance troupe Caminos Flamenco, and the classes of Manuela Rios in Seville. Taken over a four-year period, these photographs allow the reader a glimpse into the rigorous training of the dancers.

Why don't you...run away and start over? Ten-hour shifts in a high-end department store and catering to snooty customers...Nellie Bennett's life wasn't supposed to turn out this way. But maybe all she needs to do is infuse a little passion into her routine—through flamenco dance lessons, for instance. What Nellie doesn't realize is that flamenco is not just a dance—it's a way of life that seems much more enticing than her depressing retail gig. So she packs her suede dance shoes and leaves everything she knows behind, flying halfway around the world to seek the authentic experience in Seville, where the dark-eyed boys and mouth-watering tapas are enough to make Nellie want to stay in Spain forever. And why shouldn't she? Only in Spain is a foot-stomping, full-on firecracker of a memoir—crackling with energy, food, dance, passion, and love—that will capture your heart with the first "Olé!" "A vivid, entertaining memoir...Bennett had me itching to pack my bag and join her."—Ann Vanderhoof, author of An Embarrassment of Mangoes and The Spice Necklace

How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, in the span between 1492 and 1933, the vanquished Moor became Black, and how this figure, enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, paradoxically came to represent Spain itself. The imagined Gypsy about which flamenco imagery turns dances on a knife's edge delineating Christian and non-Christian, White and Black worlds. This figure's subversive teetering undermines Spain's symbolic linkage of religion with race, a prime weapon of conquest. Flamenco's Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful confusion and ruckus cloaking embodied resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by enslavement and colonization.