“You are rotating your hips. Wrong. The gown is not changed sides with the hips, it is changed with the feet and knees. If your feet and knees are well positioned, it goes alone. If not, he moves as he pleases. We repeat. With energy". The class is at the Jerez Dance Center, one of the most traditional academies in the city that is the birthplace of flamenco, which every summer organizes workshops taught by great figures that attract dancers from all over the world. Tuesday, August 10, 2021. Alegrías session with bata de cola. After an hour and a half without a break, the nine students seem beaten. The ruffles are tangled and the tails of the skirts drag already with little verve. The bata de cola is a hell of a complement. But there is no truce. The guitar sounds. Again. "No no no. You have to define. If we don't define each movement well, it doesn't work.You have to be precise because, attention, this is very important: everything has consequences with the bata de cola ”.
Everything has consequences with the bata de cola. The phrase is repeated often during class. It is an artistic truth, but it also sounds like an existential maxim in the mouth of the person who pronounces it, who is not a woman as one would expect when trying to teach how to handle the feminine complement par excellence of flamenco, but rather a man. His name is Manuel Liñán, he was born in Granada 41 years ago to a bullfighter father and a housewife mother, he learned to dance "like men" both in academies and in tablaos and the first time he dared to go out on stage wearing a bata de cola and shawl was 34 years old and scared to death. "Oh, my mother, I thought all the time: I hope they don't insult me or say anything to me or call me a fag because then I break down and I won't be able to dance," he remembers. None of that happened. On the contrary, the public stood up.
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Manuel Liñán and the Kukai company, National Dance Awards 2017
'Long live': a 'trockadero' with drama
That happened in February 2014. Again in Jerez, Villamarta theater, where you can consecrate yourself or crash forever.
Liñán participated in the show
Los Guests,
by Belén Maya.
Actually, it was not the first time that he had been seen in the bata de cola.
When she was part of Rafaela Carrasco's company, she choreographed a farruca for three bailaores in bata within her show
Una vistas del flamenco
(2004).
“What happens is that there the wardrobe was more ambiguous, underneath it was the robe and above it we wore a straight-lined vest, a more virile complement.
On the other hand, there were three of us and the number was presented inserted in a dramaturgical context ”, the bailaor clarifies.
Just like when Antonio Canales dressed up to play Bernarda Alba in 1997 or Rubén Olmo, current director of the Spanish National Ballet, put on a robe in 2010 to honor the late Manuela Vargas.
The one of
the guests
was another thing.
“Belén gave me free rein.
He told me: put on your bata de cola and shawl and do whatever you want.
There was no context, there was no character.
It was Manuel in a bata de cola and a shawl.
With nothing to justify it.
That was the impact, ”Liñán stresses.
Manuel Liñan, in the foreground, during his alegrías class with bata de cola at the Jerez Dance Center, last Tuesday.Juan Carlos Toro
From that moment everything changed for the bailaor.
“Rafaela was the one who taught me to move the robe and then I continued investigating with her, incorporating her in some of my shows and they even called me from the Spanish National Ballet, at the time it was directed by Antonio Najarro, to set up a number to women with that complement.
But going out like this without justification in Bethlehem was a before and after, "he says.
By then Liñán was already a dancer recognized by the public and had the respect of critics, who praised the purity of his technique, his freshness on stage and his uniqueness. He had also started to emerge as a choreographer, had won a few awards and had formed his own company after going through a few prestigious ones such as those of Carmen Cortés, Rafaela Carrasco, Merche Esmeralda and Manolete. So when he appeared on the Villamarta stage with his bata de cola, no one argued.
That same year he put on a show with his company,
Nómada
,
in which he took off the robe again. The same: no argument to justify it. Another success. And it did not stop: in all its following assemblies the robe came out again. “At the beginning, within the profession there were people who questioned me for insisting on that. But I had not put on the robe to do a fashion show one day, but to keep it. To appropriate a complement that I have wanted to wear since I was little and that I think I have the right to use whenever I want. Because it's the way I express myself ”, he warns.
The bata de cola as a sign of artistic and personal identity. Beyond gender and above any sexual condition. That is Manuel Liñán. He does not dance like a woman or like a man or
queer
or
drag,
although they have told him all that.
Dance like he is.
A revolutionary who has opened new paths for flamenco based on his aesthetic rebellion.
Just as other bailaores of his generation have done such as Rocío Molina, Olga Pericet, Daniel Doña or Marco Flores, with whom he has collaborated on several occasions: each in his own way, forging his identity through dance, they have advanced the genre breaking stereotypes and prejudices.
This was recognized by the jury that in 2017 awarded him the National Dance Award for the “richness of his performance, which draws on various influences, while broadening the horizons of flamenco”.
Manuel Liñán, in red in the foreground, in his show '¡Viva!'. MANUEL LIÑÁN COMPANY
The apotheosis came in February 2019 with the premiere of
¡Viva!
,
a joyous spectacle that arouses cheers wherever it goes. A vibrant work in which Liñán dresses along with six other dancers to evoke the female universe that he observed so much in his childhood. Critics Award at the Jerez Festival and Max del Público in 2020. And a long tour that is still going on (his next stops are next Saturday in Alicante and on August 27 in Pamplona) and that should have taken him to Nueva last season. York, London, Miami or Tokyo if the pandemic had not been interposed. In all these cities, new dates are already being considered.
Strolling through Jerez after class on Tuesday, that city where he has lived so many glorious nights, Liñán still seems to not give credit to all that is happening to him. Although on the other hand, he has not stopped working so that precisely that would happen to him. The freedom to be and dance as you please.
Live!
it is the most genuine expression of that exercise of freedom.
“When I was a child, I locked myself in my room to put on my mother's things and watch the VHS tapes on which I used to record the Canal Sur programs where the dancers of the time appeared.
I remember when I first saw Milagros Mengíbar, who is a great bailaora teacher and a benchmark for the bata de cola.
When I discovered that woman in a recording dancing for snails, with chopsticks, a bata de cola and a fan, I said to myself: 'What a shit I was born a man'.
I was amazed.
And not being able to opt for that… it made me mad! ”, He remembers.
The context was not conducive for the Liñán boy to dare to leave his room wearing his mother's dress.
And even less if his father, the bullfighter Manuel Arroyo, nicknamed
El Extremeño, was at home.
that his career was cut short by a traffic accident he suffered before his son was born: “Both hips were broken, he was left lame and with a lot of iron in his legs. So when I was born, after two older sisters, he thought: 'Well, this is going to be the one to keep doing what I couldn't. He would take me to the bullfights, I would dress as a bullfighter… But I didn't like it, because I didn't like it ”. As the father wanted him to be a bullfighter and the mother a dancer, in the family they jokingly said that if the former came out, Arroyo would have his artistic surname and if the latter came out, Liñán would wear, which was the mother's. And with Liñán he stayed. “In spite of everything, both my father and my mother always supported me. He does not come to see me, I understand that it is very difficult because of his education, but he is happy with every success, ”he says.
Manuel Liñán, in a moment of 'Nómada'.
In video, trailer of the show.PACO VILLALTA |
MANUEL LIÑÁN COMPANY
Away from home was not easy either.
Once the boy Liñán wanted to enroll in a bata de cola class and they told him that men could not enter because they were doing a hip warm-up.
"In the academy, when I started to move my hands, they told me: 'No, you have to make them straight.'
Or they laughed at me.
Then I stopped moving them so that no one would laugh anymore.
It has always been difficult for me to understand why it is so funny to see a man in a skirt.
I didn't wear it to be funny, I wore it because I liked it ”.
The trick of humor seemed then the only alternative. Because there have always been dancers who have wanted to perform in a bata de cola, but relegated to marginal spaces, cabarets or as a comic resource. In the essay
Historia queer del flamenco
(Egales, 2020)
,
the bailaor Fernando López collects and vindicates dozens of artists who inhabited the periphery of cante and dance from the beginning of the 19th century to today, from transvestites and effeminates to
machorras
and people of “fluid gender”. People who never made it to the big theater stages. Liñán didn't go there: “My father's brother was a transvestite, he did
shows
in cabarets and I didn't understand why he always had to be being nice. My obsession in these years has been to give normality to that aesthetic. And take it to the theaters in a formal way, within a quality artistic proposal, regardless of transvestism ”.
The process to achieve this was slow and difficult. “When you start looking for a place in the dance you need the approval of the profession. I remember them saying to me: 'Very good, Manuel, keep dancing like uncles, always remember, don't go for other branches'. Because they saw other inclinations in me. And that stopped me because I didn't want to disappoint. It took me years to dare, ”he explains.
Luckily he dared and did not disappoint.
Neither the public nor the critics.
“Notice that I got worse reviews when I danced without a robe.
Some described me as a mannered bailaor ”, he says with a laugh.
Nor did he disappoint his teachers.
Suddenly, around a corner in Jerez we run into one of them, the choreographer Javier Latorre, who merges with Liñán in a brother's hug.
The recognition is now mutual.
Other references for him have been "Milagros Mengíbar, Eva la Yerbabuena, Rocío Molina, Manolete, El Güito, Manuela Carrasco, Javier Barón".
Manuel Liñan hugs himself in a fortuitous encounter with the choreographer Javier Latorre on a street in Jerez.JUAN CARLOS TORO
And are you not worried that the image of a bailaor in a bata de cola will overlap your profile as an artist? He responds: “Look, they've put all kinds of labels on me and I understand that because they've never known where to fit me. They asked me: 'But what are you? Transvestite?
Queer? Drag? '
I didn't know what to answer. Actually, I don't mind any of those labels and I even believe that sometimes they are necessary to take certain steps forward and help others to do so. Man, there have been some headlines in the press that have hurt me, like one that said: 'Transvestites and combs arrive in Granada'. As if a circus were coming. But what really bothers me is having to justify myself. I don't want my aesthetic freedom to be justified by a label ”. Insults don't bother him either, as there have always been. “Especially in social networks. But at this point I don't care. What's more, I denounce it ”, he assures.
In full maturity, Liñán prepares a new show that will premiere in November at the Suma Flamenca festival in Madrid, in which he returns to settle accounts with his past, but in a different way. “With
¡Viva!
I was cured of my childhood. I had to go through there to be able to tackle this job now. Here I meet my father and with the weight of that tradition that paralyzed me so much. I have had to reconcile and understand my disagreement and be able to open other doors ”, he explains.
The show already has a title,
Pie de Hierro,
which is his father's second surname, which as a child Liñán thought it had to do with all the iron that had been put into the bullfighter's legs after his accident.
The past now no longer hurts, it is assumed.
And he appears on stage with all the freedom earned.
As if to say: “I am Manuel Liñán.
And you, do you know who you are?
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