to start the song … to stop the scream: Niño de Elche and Arto Lindsay in Performance

English

June Jordan responds to the world-weary gaze of a Black newsboy named Sylvester in an eponymous 1914 painting by Robert Henri: “What do you suppose he hears every evening?”¹ Jordan’s illustrated poem Who Look at Me (1969) gives its beautiful title to the exhibit and performance series, continents like seeds, CARA: “New energies of darkness we/ disturbed a continent/ like seeds”… “and life grows slowly/ so we grew”… “by setting up a separate sail/ to carry life/ to start the song … to stop the scream.”²

The exhibit is a transatlantic gathering of three artists, La Chola Poblete, from Argentina, and Pedro G. Romero with Niño de Elche, from Spain. G. Romero is an acclaimed researcher, curator, editor, and artist who often uses flamenco as the idiom of his performance-based work. Francisco Contreras Molina, “Niño de Elche,” is an “ex-flamenco singer,” provocateur, satirist, and valiant improviser who has collaborated, in addition to G. Romero, with experimentalists ranging from dancer Juan Carlos Lérida to Colombian writer, producer, and avant-garde musician Eblis Álvarez. Reaching across the globe, and mixing and mashing up many mediums and genres, the work presented in continents like seeds is located in the body, which, as the curators write, “holds and attempts to release traces of violence that cannot be undone.” For G. Romero and Niño de Elche, these traces tell stories of a body that is flamenco. The voice, too, is central here: the song, the whisper, and the “terrible spectacle” of a scream which, as Fred Moten writes of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester—pours its content out “in excess and disruption of meaning.”³ For Lorca, this was flamenco’s “decapitated Dionysian cry”—both a tired cliché and a devastating truth emerging from the throat like a “jet of blood.”⁴

G. Romero and Niño de Elche’s intervention, Sadopítna, o sea, antipodas, puesto del revés y boca abajo (Sedopitna, or antipodes, turned inside out and upside down) (2023–ongoing), references not only a mirror world of appropriated signifiers, but literally the inverted view from “Down Under”: the Antipodes (Australia and New Zealand).⁵ Mantones de Manila, beautifully embroidered silk shawls, evoke the once preeminent Spanish Empire and the circumnavigating galleons that wrought the so-called “New World,” from the Philippines to the Caribbean, in a maelstrom of human trafficking, rapacious violence, and Catholic fervor. Ironically, these mantones are also emblematic of flamenco, which emerged from the socially dead periphery to become such a lucrative tourist lure that its image vexingly swallowed that of Imperial Spain. The interweaving threads of these shawls, delicate in their craftmanship and shimmering in their beauty, are framed in rough wooden sound boxes, in homage to the timber of the vast Americas but also to minimalist artist Robert Morris’s auditory installation Voice (1973–74). The sounds filling the galleries circle referentially not only through shifting geographies but also through different temporalities—as does Niño de Elche’s stage name, a reference to the many “Niños” of flamenco’s 1930s.

Of the nine songs that make up Sadopítna, the song/score performed on the occasion of the opening was “VIII. A soleá song in honor of Darcy Lange and Miriam Snijders.” The free-floating resonances of this work center around Darcy Lange (1946–2005), a film and video artist from New Zealand who, as a student at the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1970s, was experimenting with environmental and time-based or “impermanent and counter-commodity” media.⁶ At the same time, Lange played flamenco guitar, frequently traveling to Morón de la Frontera to see legendary Roma guitarist Diego Amaya Flores, “Diego del Gastor” (1908–1973).⁷ In those days, the tiny, dusty Andalusian town drew dabblers, hippies, dropouts and some who adopted flamenco as their own and never left. They came in search of the fiesta, of authenticity, of flamenco as a way of life and not a theatrical or commercial craft. Lange held to his flamenco practice throughout his life. Between 1988 and 1994 he and his partner Miriam Snijders created an “audiovisual environmental opera,” Aire del Mar, weaving together flamenco, as a lifestyle resistant to colonial oppression and capitalism, with the struggles, to preserve their land and their lives within it, of the Māori people of Lange’s native New Zealand.⁸

Into this concatenation of references, as G. Romero kindly explained to me, we must insert Dan Graham, a performance-based artist and longtime friend of Lange. Graham applauded Lange’s interest in flamenco as a way of being in the world; he likened flamenco to the raptures of the punk and noise scenes of the early ’80s. Graham’s c. 1982–84 film, Rock my Religion, compares this music scene to the Shakers’ moral clarity, bodily discipline, and ecstatic ritual.⁹ In the opening frames of Graham’s film we see a mosh pit of writhing, sweaty, half-clothed men, and soon hear a heavy heartbeat and clashing, distorted electric guitar sounds as Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth builds up to a scream in “Shaking Hell”: “Come closer and I’ll take off your dress/ I’ll take off your dress/ I’ll shake off your flesh/ I’ll shake off your flesh/ I’ll shake off your flesh/…” In rock critic Greil Marcus’s words, the song is “an ambush, a door slammed in your face.” It “slowly, deliberately erases the lines between submission and domination, fantasy and rape, performance and violence, crimes and punishment.”¹⁰

I attended the exhibit opening and inaugural performance by Niño de Elche and Arto Lindsay, a musician born in Virginia and raised in Brazil, who works in the vein of no wave and noise music; among other experimental rock groups, Lindsay is a founding member of the band DNA.¹¹ In the performance space was an arte povera preset of several guitars; a few cheap, machine-made flamenco shawls; and military helmets strewn across the floor, with green and fragrant plants growing out of them like a jungle encroaching on decaying colonial edifices. Decrepit lace was wound around the mike stands, and some white powder, perhaps flour, perhaps sand, was sprinkled across the floor. The performance was packed, and much of the audience stood or sat on the floor at the edge of the performing space, as I did. I was thrilled to see flamenco, so often viewed as a fusty colonialist anachronism, residing here.

Before the performance started, ear plugs were handed out, a gesture of care. Lindsay, pale and unassuming, entered and picked up his electric guitar. Niño de Elche entered, took off his shirt and, assuming the flamenco role in a gender-inverted way, wrapped himself in several of the small flamenco shawls that had been on the floor. He picked up his flamenco guitar and began playing and singing the deconstructed strains of a flamenco soleá, distorting words and timbres, stopping mid-phrase to create, as Daniel Valtueña writes, “other,” and “queer” spaces. He was referencing a soleá tradition that, as flamencos know, grows from Diego del Gastor, Lange’s guitar teacher, and Diego’s brother-in-law, the legendary Roma singer Luis Torres Cádiz, “Joselero” (1910–1985).¹² “Me juegan (juzgan) consejo de guerra/ si me ven hablar contigo/ allí en Puerto Tierra” (“They will court martial me/ if they see me talking to you/ over there in Puerto Tierra). Even as it evokes the counter-culture flamenco scene of 1960s and ’70s Morón, this traditional verse also references Spain’s implacably violent imperial past. Lindsay’s crashing response came with a screeching and distorted guitar chord painfully reverberating through the bodies of all present. I hadn’t picked up ear plugs, but I couldn’t see how they would have helped much.

Niño de Elche sang another verse from Joselero and Diego del Gastor’s soleá: “Yo te estoy queriendo a ti/ con la misma violencia/ que lleva el ferrocarril” (“I am loving you/ with the violence/ of a freight train”), another historical reference, this time to the innocent wonder expressed in many flamenco verses about the advent of train travel in Spain’s early nineteenth century. At moments (to my great relief) the two artists whispered to each other, not seeming to understand each other but somehow melding their voices, Lindsay in Portuguese, Niño de Elche lingering over words like “guerra” and “violencia.” “Te estoy camelando…,” he sang, substituting the Roma Caló word “camelar” for the Spanish “querer.” This is a device used by many flamenco artists, from the Niños of the 1930s to Rosalía, that touches on painful and contentious debates within the flamenco community regarding Roma authorship and cultural appropriation. It is a kind of race mimicry, a commodification of the “stage Gypsy” that, I have argued, embodies centuries-old representations of Blackness. Thus, writing on Rosalía’s synthesis of flamenco and Black American hip-hop forms like trap, Gitana activist Noelia Cortés accuses her of putting on elements of Gitano culture “that have historically been used as resistance,” as if they were “false eyelashes.”¹³ I felt Niño de Elche was using this term ironically, but I was acutely aware that, aside from the artists, me, and Miguel Marin, founder and director of the Flamenco Festival, these Bourdieuian distinctions were probably invisible to most of the audience. I was also acutely aware that there were no Roma flamencos present.

“Te estoy queriendo … con la fuerza…,” Niño de Elche sang, but his voice was broken and distorted, and he seemed to choke on the sentimental words. Strumming discordant chords to Lindsay’s dystopian sounds, they built to a screaming climax. The noise was horrible and punishing, and I wondered, “Is this what flamenco sounds like to foreigners?”

The screaming finally receded, and both sang meditatively as Niño de Elche deliberatively stepped on the guitars on the floor, breaking them one by one. I laughed to myself, relieved. The artists embraced after a scorching improvisation. Rather than a conversation, the performance had seemed like a matchup, one in which Spain was dwarfed and broken, like the guitars, incinerated in the rage of its former subjects. And flamenco, which grows from the seeds of the Roma experience in Spain, was the offering. I was shaken.

I will give June Jordan the last word:

“I want to hear something other than a single/ ringing on the concrete.”¹⁴

^Notes
1 June Jordan, Who Look at Me (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969), 41–42.
² Jordan, Who Look at Me, 63, 74.
³ Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Dublin: Webb and Chapman, 1846[1845]), 6; Fred Moten, Black and Blur: Consent not to be a single being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), ix.
⁴ Federico García Lorca, Finding Duende: Duende Play and Theory / Imagination Inspiration Evasion, bilingual edition, ed. José Javier León and Christropher Maurer, trans. Christopher Maurer (Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 2024), 24, 27. See also Nathaniel Mackey, “Cante Moro,” in Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, and Notes (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 181–98, reprinted with permission on the CARA Research page, February 2025, https://www.cara-nyc.org/research/cante-moro.
⁵ I would like to thank José Javier León, Alicia Navarro, Pedro G. Romero, and Miguel Ángel Vargas for conversations that helped me think about this work.
⁶ For more on Darcy Lange and Maria Snijders’s Aire del Mar (1988–94), see the work’s reconstruction at the Bergen Assembly 2019, https://2019.bergenassembly.no/contributors/darcy-lange/; Mercedes Vicente, “Darcy Lange: Enduring Time,” RCA Society, accessed April 15, 2025, https://www.rcasociety.net/content/darcy-lange-enduring-time; and Mercedes Vicente, Darcy Lange: Videography as Social Practice (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 234.
⁷ For more on the Morón scene, see Donn Pohren, The Art of Flamenco (Shaftesbury: Musical New Services, 1962); Daniel Seymour, A Loud Song (New York: Lustrum Press, 1971); José María Velázquez-Gaztelu, “The Mirror of a Distant Land,” in Flamenco Project: Una ventana a la visión extranjera, 1960–1985, ed. Steve Kahn (Sevilla: Cajasol, Obra social, 2010), 63–71; and K. Meira Goldberg, “Bohemian Beats: Flamenco New York and the Greenwich Village Scene,” in A Cultural History of Dance: Twentieth Century, ed. Marion Kant (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
⁸ G. Romero collaborated on a restaging of this work at Tabakalera, Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain, on February 22, 2019, https://www.tabakalera.eus/en/aire-del-mar-darcy-lange-1988-1994/.
⁹ See Darcy Lange and Mercedes Vicente, Darcy Lange: Study of an Artist at Work (Birmingham, Manchester: Ikon Gallery, 2008); and Dan Graham, Rock My Religion, 1982–84. Video, b/w, color, sound, 55:27 min.
¹⁰ Greil Marcus, liner notes, Sonic Youth, Confusion Is Sex, reissue, Geffen Records GEC 24511, 1995.
¹¹ Various Artists, No New York, Antilles AN 7067, November 1978, LP.
¹² Daniel Valtueña, “Niño de Elche, a Heterotopian (Flamencx) Voice,” in Celebrating Flamenco's Tangled Roots: The Body Questions, ed. K. Meira Goldberg and Antoni Pizà (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022), 126–37.
¹³ Lorena G. Maldonado, “Los gitanos atacan a Rosalía: ‘Usa nuestros símbolos como pestañas postizas,’” El Español, May 31, 2018, https://www.elespanol.com/cultura/musica/20180531/gitanos-atacan-rosalia-usa-simbolos-pestanas-postizas/311468865_0.html. Cortés’s tweets can be found in K. Meira Goldberg, “Raising Cain: Dancing the Ethics and Poetics of Diaspora in Flamenco,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, eds. Naomi Jackson, Rebecca Pappas, and Toni Shapiro-Phim (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 361–62. See also K. Meira Goldberg, Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
¹⁴ Jordan, Who Look at Me, 87–88.

K. Meira Goldberg is a flamenco performer, choreographer, teacher, and scholar. In 1980s Madrid, she performed nightly in flamenco tablaos, including Manolo Caracol’s illustrious Los Canasteros, alongside world-renowned artists. In the US, she was first dancer with Carlota Santana, Fred Darsow, and Pasión y Arte. As a scholar, she has instigated and collaborated on 100 Years of Flamenco in NYC (2013), Flamenco on the Global Stage (2015), The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song and Dance (2016), Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song, and Dance (2019), Indígenas, africanos, roma y europeos. Ritmos transatlánticos en música, canto y baile (2021), and Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots: The Body Questions (2022). Her monograph Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco (2019 and, in Spanish, 2022) won the Barnard Hewitt Award and Honorable Mention for the Sally Banes Publication Award, both from the American Society for Theatre Research.