Anywayz, as I was about to say, last night was awesome. :-) The dancers were Pam de Ocampo and Claudia de Baltimore (what I'm calling her for now until we come up with a stage name for her--any suggestions?). For the first set, we opened as usual with Sevillanas and Pam danced an alegrías for her solo.

Of course, we didn't have any rehearsal or discussion about Pam's dance--not complaining though. Actually I consider it a compliment that the dancers have enough confidence in my accompaniment skills to go onstage without rehearsing.

So let's see...the last time I performed with her was last Saturday in the Pastora show (which I'll blog on later this week) so moments before her dance, I tried to recall the overall structure of the choreography. Of course, Pam danced a different one entirely which was fine. I had to go into relax and pay attention cuz you don't know what's coming next mode. So as she executed each llamada, I instinctively would consult at lightning-speed my mental database of past llamadas and tried to find a match. Same for the letras. Same for the subidas. Same for the silencio. So far so good.

Lately, the trend among DC area flamenco dancers is whether or not to go old skool and do a castellana before the escobilla or skip it entirely. She went old skool. Then she closed the castellana and then I had to pay close attention again.

Another trend is whether to start off the escobilla section super slow (usually in sixteenths) and then a few compases later double the tempo without warning or just do straight ahead footwork. Pam doubled the tempo. The next thing I looked for was accents in the compás where I could play cortes. Anyway, you get the idea. Playing for dancers is an interactive process. The dancers give the guitarist subtle signals about what's coming next but you have to pay close attention to catch them. It's mentally stimulating for both parties when the guitarist and dancer know how to communicate with each other.

By the time it came to Claudia's soleá I was mentally warmed-up and I just relaxed and "jammed" with her (although subconsciously I was doing all of the above mental calculations). What was cool was that I able to rise above figuring out what she was doing and just relax and musically play around with the accents and harmonic progressions. Pure fun!

Chillin' out at the bar after the show. July 18, 2006 9:53pm

So it's 11:47am on Wednesday. My gig at Cafe Bonaparte was cancelled at the last minute (just for this week, though) so my schedule is now wide open sort of. I have to do a couple of errands related to my weekend trip to Maine. Can't wait! I'll be performing at the Harpswell Festival with one of my favorite dancers, enjoying the cool beautiful weather, the gorgeous views of the bay, oh and of course, some of the best fresh seafood in the world, yum! Checkout da pics from last year.