myths of video flamenco part one: Antonio Gades

He was born in 1936 in a village near Alicante from a humble family.
The encounter with the dance occurred by chance, "starvation", at the age of fifteen years.
Left without work, a neighbor of Gades suggest him to go to a flamenco school, in Madrid someone was looking for flamenco dancers.
Three months later, in a "tablao", where he was dancing was noted by Pilar Lopez who took him in his company.

He stayed with this company for nine years, studying all the popular spanish dances and classic dance also.
These are the years of his great "love" for the poetry of García Lorca reading by an clandestine edition (in the Franco Spain he didn't joke at all) of Romancero gitano.
Gades started to search the relationship between flamenco-old Garcia Lorca contents and that spanish culture that was being eroded.
He had, Antonio Gades, grit, charisma, a great charm. The choreographer Luciana Novaro, after having seen him dancing, called him to set up at La Scala in Milan El amor brujo. It was 1962.
In Spain and all over the world, thanks to the tour of his company, Gades became a myth. Especially in 1978 when the post-Franco Spain gave to Gades the direction of a national company.
Then, in 1981,he begins the happy marriage with film and video director Carlos Saura, 1981 is also the year of the masterpiece "Bodas de sangre", a real cult for those who love video flamenco and ballet.



In the wake of that movie success, in August 1982 the Gades company went to the old Teatro Romano in Verona with the ballet version of the movie Bodas de sangre and Suite flamenca.
These are the hot days of August: the women go into ecstasy for him and men literally lost them heads for Cristina Hoyos (the bride).
Hoyos and Gades are also the interpreters of the film and both express a sensuality probably never seen on the stage of the Teatro Romano.
The bouquets of red roses that arrived on the floor was hundreds.

Antonio Gades went back another time in Verona in 1996. He was Sixty this time, he appeared very tired almost his body predicted something.
He died eight years later in Madrid in 2004, when cancer took him away, but we always remember him next to Carmen Amaya in the video flamenco movie
"Los Tarantos" of 1963, the Gades full of charm that will never fade.