A hundred years have passed since the birth of Lola Flores, a singer, actress and dancer who has made history, mainly thanks to her overwhelming personality
Lola Flores was born as an artist in the Jerez de la Frontera of the harsh post-war period, in a Spain in black and white, ration cards and black market. His roots are there. A world of taverns, wine and rough flamenco, of parties for young men, farms and gypsies, where women have always been relegated to the marginal, to the forbidden.
Soon he will make a virtue of necessity, and will see in these adverse areas an opportunity to shine his own light and make a name for himself in the world of entertainment, for “dancing, gold of the law… . that goes wherever it pleases”, he writes Caballero Bonald about one of his characters in Two days in September.
Flamenco and a bloated gypsy, the then “young canzonetista and dancer”, according to the publicity of the time, made her debut in the theater of Villamarta, as “Lolita Flores Imperio de Jerez”, with the pasodoble Cuna cañí, which she took from the Pastora Imperio Repertoire.
She does so as an opening act in the company led by Custodia Romero and Melchor de Marchena in their variety show Luces de España, in a performance billed as a gitanería. All of this takes place on October 10, 1939, just after the Civil War. The regime’s “forty years of peace” begins; actually the terrible post-war one. Lola Flores was only sixteen years old.
It is precisely at that moment that Lola Flores begins to create her own character on and off stage. For this he uses Manolo Caracol, one of the best flamenco singers of his time, and his famous stage novels Zambra (1944-1949) by Quintero, León and Quiroga, lyrical shows that combine copla, flamenco and variety shows, a kind of Broadway musical but Spanish.
Shortly before, he had already triumphed with El Lerele, by the maestros Currito and Genaro Monreal in 1941, another more or less occasional exotic copla zambra whose particular interpretation managed to attract the attention of businessmen, the public and other artists: «Suddenly , more than a cantaora-bailaora, a hurricane, a great flamenco artist left us speechless. Don’t forget this name: Lola Flores,” said the theater critic for Informaciones.
The truth is that in those zambras the artist collected the flamenco witness to the best silver age of Spanish culture, thanks to such relevant figures of dance, song, music, poetry or theater as Argentina, the Argentinita, Rafael Escudero, Pastora Imperio, the Lorca from Gypsy Ballads and Blood Wedding or the Falla from El amor brujo.
But he did it with a passionate feeling for the copla, a very naturalistic expressiveness, an interpretation guided by the deception of an exuberant sexuality and a modernity that challenged the morality of the regime. Something like a ‘nerealistic’ way of dramatizing song and dance, which will be his personal trademark until the end.
Because La Salvaora – another one of her nicknames – knew how to give body and life to all those copla stories in her very own way. Stories from a dark past of single mothers and lovers addicted to alcohol, repeated over and over again in La Parrala, La Lirio, La Ruiseñora, La Lola, Elvira la cantaora, all flamenco with ‘their swags entangled in thorns’ . Women of low life and fitness — green eyes, tattoo, that’s me, Rosa the one with the dots — who seemed to challenge a unique world of men.
They were protagonists in stories that recalled the long lineage of the cursed and rebellious Lilith – Adam’s first mate to Eve – that legendary, free and indomitable figure of ancient mythology and Jewish folklore. Examples of a different morality that had always been exposed as the canon of female perversity.
Lola Flores’ stage presence, in addition to her personal life, had a lot of that: “because it was also a pithy anecdote,” says Terenci Moix, “filling the post-war pudiness with passionate legends of decent temperature.” She represented the sociology of Petenera, according to Francisco Umbral: that powerful woman of flamenco ancestors who has now transformed into a fetish of herself.
La Zarzamora was one of his most sincere interpretation creations. In the almost autobiographical piece of music, created especially for her by Quintero, León and Quiroga, fiction and reality are mixed around a passionate flamenco flamenco, an impossible love and a fatality “between parmas and joy”.
This verse, in the rhythm of a march and with boundless theatricality, tells a tragic plot about a cantaora “who always laughed / And assumed she broke the hearts” of her lovers, but who goes mad as a victim of unrequited love. With great descriptive power and rapid dramatization, sometimes expressionistic and sometimes impressionistic, she metaphorically alludes to her status as a “treacherous” woman whose mysterious eyes have been compared to the characteristic red fruits with thorns of the blackberry:
They nicknamed it because they say it was
eyes like the blackberry.
It also emphasizes the religious and emotional metaphor of the Via Dolorosa and the color purple, the liturgical color of Lent, self-denial and sacrifice – “that it brings and that it carries / along the street of pain” -. It refers here to the protagonist’s trial and suffering as if it were a new Christ in a female version. This symbolizes the inevitable outcome as a Greek tragedy. The story condemned the protagonist, without the possibility of regeneration, to the condition of a fatal woman, as her lover “wears a wedding ring.”
In summary, a character and a serial story about impossible love and a moralizing end result. A baroque and authentic print of more or less secret prostitution in “er Café de Levante” that serves to draw this femme fatale made in Spain that represented the artist from Jerez so well compared to the other models of the natural woman according to the time – wife, mother, submissive and devoted.
The deceit, haggard beauty and provocative body of the Fire Maiden challenged everything that was preached outside the theater by the thinking minds of Francoism and humble bourgeoisie.
This article was published in ‘The conversation‘.
Source: La Verdad
I am David Jackson, a highly experienced professional in the news industry. I have been working as an author at Today Times Live for over 10 years, and specialize in covering the entertainment section. My expertise lies in writing engaging stories that capture readers’ attention and deliver timely information about the latest developments.
