Toe in the Water

Sara Jiménez

Sara Jiménez

I am no great fan of dancing but have always liked flamenco, the guitar playing, the singing and the dancing. It is so powerful a form of communication that one can hardly ignore it.

Over the years of YouTube, I have occasionally discovered videos of flamenco in the streets of Spanish cities and in places where tourists gather. I thought I knew flamenco well and then, just recently, I came across the work of this amazing (and scary) lady who demonstrates that I had seen nothing yet. She expresses the ethos of the music so well that there is nothing to say but wow.

In this first video that I urge you to watch, she is using the castanets which is fairly rare in modern flamenco as they concentrate heavily on the footwork. But it’s the completeness of her dancing that is so riveting. She can stand completely motionless, move in slow motion, strike poses so dramatic that we can hardly understand what drives her and then burst into a flurry of speed and sound that is breathtaking, and still we are transfixed.

And, all the time her face says exactly what she is feeling - she is an accomplished actress as well as a dancer. Every movement evokes a response in us, even the barely discernible shake of her head at times and the brief flash of a softer expression at times. This is artistry at the extreme edge.



The second video is closer to the kind of dance you can see performed by street artists in Spain but, when Sara shows how it’s done, even the most resistant of us must surely be undone. Never a foot wrong and pure passion from beginning to end.

As I said before - wow.



Note how she stays in character throughout. Even when the audience bursts out in applause at a particularly difficult section, her expression stays in the mood of the music. Only at the end when she re-enters for applause, does she allow herself a faint smile. And, when her hair begins to escape from its combs, she turns her back briefly while she adjusts them but never allows our attention to slip from her. We are totally hypnotised.


Word Count: 379