Vancouver International Flamenco Festival: Dark Sounds

 

The 35th Edition of the Vancouver International Flamenco Festival, with the community partnership of The Vancouver Writers Festival, proudly presents: 

Dark Sounds creates a powerful new experience, fusing North American speech with the intensity of flamenco to deliver urgent truths about our cultural and planetary condition. The focus is the dark core of sex, family, love, of being human. The climate crisis. Personal sorrows that accumulate while smoke veils the horizon. Here, guitarist Gareth Owen and dancer Denise Yeo affirm their reputations for responsive, deeply sensitive interpretations of English language poetry.

In traditional flamenco, dancer and guitarist improvise in response to Spanish language singers and to each other. Here, they respond to poets. They embody precision, rhythm, and silence, the warp and weft of language. The poets, in turn, reply to the dancer’s stare, the guitarist’s inflections, an audience’s unprompted intakes of breath, or drawn from deep within, cries of “olé,” “yes,” or “God damn.” Together, they stir something vital.

 

Palabra Flamenco is a literary flamenco ensemble that weaves English language poetry and storytelling with traditional flamenco. It features artistic director and dance soloist Denise Yeo, musical director and guitarist Gareth Owen, and producer and poet Garth Martens, with special guest poet Jan Zwicky.

 

With their shows La Palabra en el Tiempo and Fox Woman, the ensemble has toured the Victoria, Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Toronto Fringe Festivals, the Victoria Festival of Authors, and the Victoria Flamenco Festival.

 

Artistic director and dance soloist - Denise Yeo  

Musical director and guitarist - Gareth Owen

Producer and principal poet - Garth Martens

Guest artist and acclaimed poet - Patrick Friesen