Dancing Through the History of Flamenco

Hello,

I was watching an episode of the “Hairy Bikers” cookery show last week and they were enjoying the food of Spain. Along the way they took a turn or two with a fabulous troop of flamenco dancers and mentioned that the dance grew when displaced Moorish farmers joined up with Gypsy bands. Of course that got me wondering about the word history of flamenco.

Flamenco has been a word in English since the late 1800s and it came to us from the same word in Spanish where it described a style of Gypsy dancing in the Andalusia region in the south of Spain.

In Spanish flamenco had two meanings 1) a Fleming, i.e. a person from Flanders (in Dutch that would be Vlaming) and 2) a flamingo bird.

Flamenco dancers aren’t from Flanders, so why did they get this name and what does the bird have to do with it?

There are a myriad of possible explanations put forward by writers of the past and I’m unsure which to believe. Perhaps you can choose your own favourite?

Spain ruled Flanders during the 1500s and as a result many Flemish nobles visited the court of King Carlos I of Spain in Madrid so Fleming people were well known there.

One story says the dance was named for the bright costumes of the Flemish visitors.

Another says the Andalusians liked to name things by their opposites and because the tall, blonde Flemings were so different to the short, dark-haired Gypsies they gave them that name.

A third idea is that flamenco was the general Spanish word for all foreigners. I’m not sure of this one as they had already encountered Moorish culture at this point and traded extensively overseas so surely they had more terms for foreigners. I don’t speak Spanish myself, so can’t comment. Can you add anything?

The fourth is that Flemish nobles at the court enjoyed spending time with the Gypsies and the name stuck.

I even found one story that people watching the male flamenco dancers with their short jackets and tall posture compared them to the flamingo birds.

Flamenco is one of those words which proves how difficult it is to find the roots of a word. However we know more about how the dance itself evolved. It’s a form of dance, song, and guitar music which is associated with the Andalusian Roma (Gypsy or Gitano) people of Southern Spain.

It appears to have come to Spain thanks to a Roma migration from northwest India between the 9th and 14th centuries. They brought tambourines, bells, castanets, and their songs and dances with them. In Spain they met the cultures of the Sephardic Jews and the Moors who were increasingly being driven out by Christian Spanish rulers, and flamenco was born, primarily as something done in family groups.

The golden age of flamenco was between the end of the 1700s and the middle of the 1800s, although at that time singing was the main art form, with dancing and the music being secondary.

Flamingos probably don’t have much of a connection to flamenco but I took a quick look at their etymology too. Their name arrived in English in the 1560s from Portuguese and Spanish where is translates literally as flame-coloured (yes, they’re pink, but I can see the link). In Greek they were called phoinikopteros (red feathered) and flamenc in Provençal (flaming). They’ve always been associated with fire, and yet it’s the phoenix we most think of when talking of such ideas.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace