“I Knew It Would Look Great!”: Why Shakespeare’s Globe Gives Some Flamenco Fire | platform

HeyOn the day of a heatwave in London, Shakespeare’s Globe is transformed into a festival. High heels hit the wood panels with a thumping rhythm, skirts shake, guitar strings play, and voices rise as the temperature rises. Sitting at the front of the stage is Indiana director Leone Collins, who delivers one of Shakespeare’s wordiest plays with a sultry flamenco beat.

Lon Collins is half Spanish and grew up in Spain where flamenco was her path to the arts. While working as assistant resident director at The Globe a few years ago, she fell in love with the building and its acoustics and couldn’t stop thinking about how well flamenco worked on the oak stage, which circled the circular space. “I knew it would look amazing,” she says.

He was invited to direct a production at the theatre, and was on a quest to find a play that suited him. Lown-Collins landed in Love’s Labour’s Lost, an early comedy. A Spanish king and his masters swear off women and ban them from court, so when a foreign princess arrives, she and her ladies are forced to set up camp outside the city. Naturally, the lords all fall in love with the ladies. “A lot of this play is about passion and love and sex and death — and flamenco does sex and death really well,” says Lawn Collins.

She liked strong female characters. “Matriarchy is the heart and soul of flamenco,” she says. “We wanted to show the strength of these women who come to a court that is not theirs, to be taken seriously.” On stage at rehearsal, the women come down the stairs and begin to surround and assault the men in the center, like a gang of sirens.

There are only two professional flamenco dancers in the cast (Pablo Egea and Anita La Maltesa), and everyone else is trained in a daily three-hour boot camp by choreographer Carmen Igarza. Some of them are way out of their comfort zone. “It’s kind of like doing a rigorous job,” one team member told the actors. “From here to Sadler’s Wells, you never know!” Spanish actor Pia Segura laughs.

The progress they’ve made so far is impressive, even if you can still see people desperately counting out the beats as they try to hit accents. Just wearing the right shoes transformed the actors into flamenco performers – high heels made everyone walk with a swagger (even if some of the men in rehearsals were wearing shorts). First, Lon Collins told me, one of the actors asked for flats. “Now he says, ‘Don’t take my heels away!’ He gives you posture, strength, presence, and an air of ‘Aren’t we beautiful people!’” she says. Look how we can move!” Thinking about my British culture, I don’t think we celebrate our physical humanity in the same way. “We’re so apologetic,” she says, while in Spain it’s different: “‘Look at me and my new skirt, how tight it is, showing my gluteus maximus!’” In the play, the male characters try to hold back their emotions, but when they can’t contain them anymore, then the life force of flamenco explodes.

In addition to tying the actors’ feet and minds into knots, the complex rhythms of flamenco also reflect the language of the play. “This play has the largest number of Shakespearean stanzas I’ve ever done, and they’re constantly rhyming and juxtaposing,” Lawn-Collins says. “A few days ago someone said, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll try it to a flamenco beat, instead of Shakespeare,'” Lon Collins says. I will follow the composer,” and it worked. The music was composed by flamenco guitarists Michael McMahon and Adrian Solá, who are part of the band on stage, with musicians including singer Carlos Lobo Cordón.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a clever play full of verbal pedantry. “It’s the play called The Feast of Languages,” says Lon Collins. “And I think it’s delicious language. But yeah, it’s wordy.” That’s partly why she wanted to try a flamenco reboot. “What if I put something very deep and physical next to it?” In other words, get everyone out of their heads and into their bodies, including the audience – the audience will get their chance to move at the end of the show. “I just hope people want to dance to the dance,” Lon Collins smiles as the beat picks up.