PARAÍSO PERDIDO
Fahmi Alqhai, viola da gamba & musical arrangements
Patricia Guerrero, flamenco dance & choreography
Sara de Molina, actor
Stage direction: Juan Dolores Caballero
Programme
Marizápalos (dance on soleá)
Gaspar Sanz (1640-1710) – Fahmi Alqhai
Marionas (bulerías)
Gaspar Sanz (1640-1710) – Fahmi Alqhai
Canarios (on tangos)
Gaspar Sanz (1640-1710) – Fahmi Alqhai
Les pleurs
Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe (c. 1640 – c. 1700)
Passacaglia for solo violin, from the Rosary Sonatas (on peteneras)
Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (1644-1704)
Fandango
Santiago de Murcia (1673-1739) – Fahmi Alqhai
Sarabande from Cello Suite No. 5, BWV 1011
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Chaconne from the Violin Partita No. 2, BWV 1004
Johann Sebastian Bach
Summary
In a show that premiered at the 2020 Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla (Seville Flamenco Biennial), Patricia Guerrero and Fahmi Alqhai fuse flamenco dance with the finest Baroque music, from the Spanish repertoire to Bach’s legendary Chaconne.
Paraíso perdido was presented at the Church of San Luis in Seville. This 18th-century Baroque church stands out for its architecture and decoration, which make it a historic and acoustically suitable space for early music concerts and for shows that combine music and dance.
Programme notes
In the Seville of the 1600s, popular festivities, street songs and dances – and in particular those of the Black community settled in certain quarters of the city, such as San Bartolomé – seduced the wealthy classes: a fascinating and sinful world, alluring but harshly censured by the moralists. In the imagination of the upper classes, those festivities evoked on the one hand the paradise lost of the New World, where the nakedness of Adam and Eve was the natural state, and on the other a dark nocturnal atmosphere teeming with lewd dances, in which the deadly sins carried off bodies and souls.
Among the aristocracy – first in Seville, then throughout Spain and later across Europe – folías, canarios, chaconas and the scandalous zarabanda came into fashion: dances that arrived from the Americas through the port of Seville, with rhythmic patterns that resonate with the twelve-beat rhythms we hear today in alegrías and soleares, though their association with sin was softened to make them acceptable in refined palace circles. These dances thus embarked on parallel paths between light and darkness, between innocence and vice, with the deadly sins serving as bridges between the culture of the oppressors and that of the oppressed. Our show draws on this Baroque chiaroscuro to connect two intertwined yet distinct paths, continually linked by temptation: the proud marizápalos, the lustful marionas, the envious passacaglia and the wrathful fandango guide us, after a languorous zarabanda, to a greedy chacona that wants everything, where flamenco becomes stylised and Bach takes on a flamenco flavour.
Juan Ramón Lara