Yinka Esi Graves Performance with Buddy and Niño de Elche

Following a 4pm walkthrough of continents like seeds with CARA’s Executive and Artistic Director Manuela Moscoso, join us for a performance by dancer and flamenco artist Yinka Esi Graves with ex-flamenco cantaor Niño de Elche and DJ Buddy. Graves, Buddy, and Niño de Elche will animate the histories explored in Sadopítna, o sea, antípodas, puesto del revés y boca abajo (Sedopitna, or antipodes, turned inside out and upside down), 2023–ongoing, a sonic and sculptural work by Pedro G. Romero and Niño de Elche on view at CARA through May 18, 2025 as part of continents like seeds.

In his book Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution, historian Michael Denning contemplates the cultural significance of the shellac disks that became the earliest 78 RPM records—carriers of samba, jazz, tango, flamenco, tarab, marabi, and kro. This performance will call to mind the material histories of these manufactured records, made from shellac extracted from the Indonesian archipelago. Amidst a soundscape created by Niño de Elche and Buddy, Yinka Esi Graves will perform across CARA’s galleries, tracing her movements with chalk as if she were scratching a record.

V. “Zambra song of the shellac secreted on trees in the Indonesian archipelago, which fuelled the manufacture of 78 rpm records—known as ‘pizarra’ (slate) in flamenco, perhaps because of their similarity to school blackboards—and which served to crystallize the cañí genre—as it did the blues, the Cuban son, and tango—to solidify the myth of the vernacular, and to invent tradition and write the canon, as Michael Denning explains in his book Noise Uprising, before this phenomenon crashed with the Great Depression of 1929, punishing and impoverishing the popular classes on their path to emancipation.”

Yinka Esi Graves is a British dance maker and flamenco artist. Her work excavates the links between flamenco and contemporary forms rooted in the African diaspora. With a long career in flamenco, she studied at the Amor de Dios dance school in Madrid and later in Seville with artists such as La Lupi, Andrés Marín, Yolanda Heredia, and Juana Amaya. As a flamenco dancer she has accompanied renowned artists such as Remedios Amaya and

Concha Buika. Graves’s more recent work with dance makers and thinkers Nora Chipaumire and Dr. Ama Wray has helped further define her work, spanning from stage pieces to site-specific work as a solo artist and collaborator.

Graves’s co-creation with choreographer Asha Thomas, Clay (2016), marked the beginning of a more investigative and experimental approach to creation. She also draws from her collaborations in productions such as Cuerpos Celestes and Origen by Cia Marco Vargas and Chloé Brûlé as well as Mailles by Dorothée Munyaneza, with whom she has toured internationally.

Graves’s first solo work, The Disappearing Act, premiered at the Nimes Flamenco Festival (France 2023) and has subsequently traveled to international festivals, such as El Grec, La Batie, FIT de Cadiz, Albuquerque Flamenco Festival, Tanz Im August Festival, and Avignon Festival, among others. This piece is the culmination of the artist’s multidisciplinary exploration of invisibility and erasure as it pertains to the Black experience. As part of the Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla 2022, Graves presented The Disappearing Act: On Erasure, an illustrated lecture based on the theoretical corpus of the stage piece.

Buddy is a co-founder of Uptown Vinyl Supreme, a DJ collective and community organization born in the Bronx, New York paying homage to the analog roots of music, party, and dance culture.

Niño de Elche (b. 1985, Spain; lives and works in Madrid) and Pedro G. Romero (b. 1964, Spain; lives and works in Seville and Barcelona) are Spanish artists whose collaborations examine and reframe the traditional forms of flamenco music. Trained as a cantaor (flamenco singer), Niño de Elche pushes the boundaries of the art form by incorporating spoken word, electronic music, and multimedia elements into his performances. Romero is an accomplished visual artist and filmmaker who has collaborated extensively with Niño de Elche. He creates immersive and thought-provoking audiovisual experiences that explore themes of identity, culture, and societal norms. Taking inspiration from a variety of cultural contexts, together they create a flamenco that is both familiar and inverted, signifying the world seen from an alternative perspective.