Visiting Dancer Clara Mora Chinoy Shows Flamenco Can "Speak from the Soul"

Offstage, visiting artist in dance Clara Mora Chinoy is petite, relaxed, and soft-spoken. But onstage, the acclaimed flamenco artist seems larger than life, crackling with energy as her heels beat the complex rhythms of Spanish dance. Seeing the intense "gypsy gaze" peculiar to the flamenco style, you'd think she was a native Spaniard who grew up with the dance form. In fact, she was raised in Northampton and studied Indian dance for years before learning flamenco.

<<< "Flamenco should touch audiences with the truth," says acclaimed flamenco dancer Clara Mora Chinoy. She will perform as part of a faculty dance concert, November 14-16.

While studying Indian and modern dance and earning an anthropology degree from Harvard, Mora went to the American Dance Festival to study Indian dance. There she was also introduced to flamenco by Manolo Vargas, lead dancer with the famed Pilar Lopez company. Mora was hooked by flamenco, which she says is intense and relaxed, like martial arts. "You have to be like a tiger about to pounce, with your body ready to go in any direction."

After more training, she joined the company of Ramon de los Reyes, even leaving early from one Harvard exam to perform. Since then, she's toured the world with top Spanish dance companies, choreographed, and taught in Spain and at many U.S. colleges. She is also conducting anthropological research for a dance-theater piece based on the life stories of Gypsy women. "Their flamenco verses talk about women's experiences in a visceral and universal way," she says.

Mora says teaching flamenco to Americans is challenging. "The rhythms are hard and not familiar. The accents are uneven and constantly changing; and you have to do very different kinds of movement with your hands and arms than with your feet." And what of her own feet, which take a beating from flamenco's staccato stamping? Mora laughs, "My feet don't hurt ... but everything else does!" It's all necessary to meet her goal. "Though flamenco has become very showy and technical, it's a form of dance and music that should speak from the soul."