Modos de Hablar / Modes de Parler — Ways of Speaking — KADIST — Event — Slash Paris

Past: Saturday, June 22, 2024

With
Perrate and Luz Arcas

Curated by
Pedro G. Romero

“Register here”:://kadist.org/program/modos-de-hablar-by-pedro-g-romero/

5:30-7pm: Concert-discussion between Pedro and Perrate, translated by Julia Morandeira
7:15-8pm: La mesa que baila, Luz Arcas

If we understand that art is a language, an official language, Pedro G. Romero has always been interested in jargons: in those practices and ways of doing animated by the same tension jargon plays versus language. The ways of speaking (phonesis) are tied to the ways of doing (poiesis) and to the ways of looking (esthesis) in multiple and inescapable ways; what circulates in between and through this triangulation, is a form of true politics.

It is in the field of flamenco where Pedro G. Romero has often, more than anywhere else, encountered the resistances of these ways of speaking. He has been exploring them, traversing them, accompanying them all of these years in the form of a conversation, where inescapable and transformative affects abound. Translation is here a blessed problem, a tremor, not an authoritarian solution; or, in the face of the emergence of identity fascism, what José Bergamín calls “the popular minoritarian”.

This language that we are trying to follow — a germanía or criminal slang, the caló of the gypsies, prison languages, the glosses of the lumpen, the speech of the poets — is permanently in transit. It hardly fits in indexes or dictionaries. It is constantly reinventing itself. Fred Moten used to say to me “this is undercommons”… It is that which speaks underneath.

Pedro G. Romero has been working as an artist since 1985. He was part of UNIA arteypensamiento and member of the PRPC (Cultural Politics Reflection Platform) in Seville. He is a member of the pie.fmc team (Independent Platform for Modern and Contemporary Flamenco Studies). Participant in Documenta14 Athens/Kassel with choreographer Israel Galván and musician Niño de Elche. He directs the collection “Flamenco y cultura popular” in Athenaica publishing house. Between 2020 and 2022 he directed the films Nueve Sevillas and Siete Jereles. In 2021 he published Wittgenstein, los flamencos y los gitanos with Àrcadia publishing house. The Reina Sofia National Museum Art Center in Madrid presented in 2022 a review of his work under the title Versifying Machines. In 2023, as curator, he presented Popular at IVAM in Valencia. In 2024 he finished the film de caballos y guitarras.

Luz Arcas is a dancer, choreographer and director, founder of the La Phármaco company in 2009. She brings together her latest works in two projects: Bekristen/Tríptico de la prosperidad (2019-2023), composed of the pieces La domesticación, Somos la guerra and La buena obra; and Ciclo de los milagros (2020- 2022), composed of the pieces Toná, Trilla and Mariana. She has choreographed for the Ballet de Victor Ullate, the Compañía Nacional de Danza de El Salvador and the opera Rigoletto directed by Miguel del Arco. She is the author of the book Pensé que bailar me salvaría, published by Contintametienes, and has won numerous awards, including the Godot Award for Best Dance Work 2023, the El Ojo Crítico de Danza 2015 prize, and was a finalist at the Max Awards in several categories in 2022 and 2017, among others.

Perrate descends from one of the great gypsy dynasties of flamenco singing, the Perrate de Utrera family: he is the great-grandson of Manuel Torre, son of Perrate de Utrera, and nephew of Maria “la Perrata”. A late flamenco singer whose first love was rock music, he began to sing flamenco surprisingly, even for himself, at the age of 35 in 1999. He has since then embarked on the creative adventure of carving his own reality within professional flamenco, which he combined for many years with being a ladies’ hairdresser and running his own salon. He has a regular collaborator to great flamenco dancers such as Israel Galván, Belén Maya or Leonor Leal, to name a few, as well as with other musicians from other genres, such as Za!, Miguel Marín or Sistema Tango. His music has been collected in albums such as Tres Golpes (2022), Infundio (2010), Perraterías (2005) or Utrera Flamenca (2003).