At the age of 15, Alba Lucera saw a flamenco show for the first time in her native Geneva (Switzerland). The artist in question was called Ana La China and it made a strong and instant impression on her, but she still couldn’t imagine how well these beats would accompany the rest of her days. An experience that he wanted to capture in a book, Dance at the foot of the volcanowhich has just been released on the Libros de la Herida label, and where, beyond musical genres, he reflects on dancing, looking, feeling and thinking through artistic experience, on being a woman and a foreigner in the world of flamenco… In short, on life.
“I started to study the piano, then I did a special baccalaureate in art and music in Geneva,” he remembers. “And with my adolescence, I discovered flamenco, and I really knew that there was a change there without going back, that would change my life. After finishing high school, at 19, I went to Seville.”
Alba Lucera also identifies these days with a moment of identity crisis, “like a loss of contact with reality on a psychological level. Finding this relationship with dance, on the ground, was like a way of learning to walk again. Flamenco reconnected me to myself and also to the world.” However, these were not his only concerns, so he returned to Switzerland and studied anthropology, musicology, French and Hispanic philology… He also established bridges there between literature, dance, theater and music. The vocation of actress called her for a time, she began theater training in Paris, until she heard the call of flamenco again. “And if I took this path again, I had to return to the source, to Andalusia.”
Loss of identity
Some things led her to others: she devoted her doctoral thesis to the relationship between poetic writing and choreography. “As in the dancer’s step, the sensation of transit itself conveys the idea of passing from one place to another, a sensation like that of a nomad, of transformation, from which many questions arise. At the same time, I am writing a more intimate book, which was like a sort of testimony of my relationship to the world through dance and creation. The mixture of everything is Dance at the foot of the volcano“.
Between the first version of this text published in a French publishing house and the last in Spanish, a lot of things happened to Alba Lucera: the most important, motherhood, but also a move away from traditional flamenco towards more contemporary registers and improvisation. “I needed to find an expression that would allow me to accept my uniqueness,” he explains. “But at the beginning, saying goodbye to flamenco meant for me almost a loss of identity. Now I live it with great serenity, with gratitude for the doors that opened me to other disciplines and genres. I still love flamenco in the same way, but perhaps seeing it from another place.”
In this perspective, Alba Lucera recalls that, for those who learn flamenco, there is never a carpet laid down, “not even for those from here. In the book, I say, flamenco reminds you of the value of belonging to something, but you always find yourself with an exclusion: if you’re Spanish, it turns out you’re not Andalusian, then you’re not gypsy, then you’re not from this family, you’re not from this neighborhood… It’s a very existential question. At the time, I broke with my origins, I didn’t identify with anything in Switzerland, but at the same time I know that I will never be 100 percent here. You end up getting used to not coming from anywhere.”
The effect of music
Her partner, Dutch flamenco guitarist Tino van der Sman, also knows what it means to enter flamenco from the outside, but Alba Lucera believes that dancing is a different door. “I did my own art therapy through dance,” he says. “From a young age, I had started winning literary prizes, but I felt that writing led me to alienation, to a mental place that almost made me afraid of getting lost. I needed another type of dialogue, like that of dance, to connect with the tangible and at the same time open a space towards the symbolic. Dance is a way of seeing the world. It is not jumping into the void, but welcoming the unknown with each step. It’s a way of letting the present emerge, and it was a somewhat metaphorical invitation for me to approach life from this place, however, today I have fully returned to writing while remaining connected to dance. As I say in the first chapter of the book, “I write because.” something dance”.
Today, Alba Lucera believes that her experiences in the contemporary field make her resonate with avant-garde flamenco artists like Israel Galván or Rocío Molina. “Whatever they do, for me, they remain flamenco,” he says. “In the book I say that, rather than wanting to give names or labels, we could talk about the effect that music has on those who listen to it or who perform it.”
Finally, when asked if he imagines what his life would have been like if he had never encountered flamenco. “If I had stayed in Switzerland, I would perhaps be a music teacher, a philosophy teacher. I imagine myself there, married, with another life. But I also think that perhaps I would have found dance or artistic expression in another way. I think that in the end I am not so different from what I was when I was 15. There is something inevitable, in an almost fateful sense, which is that we cannot I can’t imagine connecting to the world in any other way.”
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