Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco by K. Meira Goldberg (review)

In the sixth chapter of K. Meira Goldberg’s Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco, a still image flickers into luminous, noisy life (154). The image is a screenshot, from footage shot by Russian choreographer Leonid Massine in 1917, in a summer spent touring Spain with Serge Diaghilev and Manuel de Falla in preparation for a new Ballets Russes work on a Spanish theme. Massine had recently acquired a sixteen-millimeter camera, and he used it to capture the movements of the renowned dancer La Macarrona, acclaimed for her performance at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, but here dancing on a roof-top in a more familiar setting. Sonidos Negros includes three screenshots from the film, the “only film of Macarrona’s dancing,” and “one of the most important extant records of this early period of flamenco dance” (153); the images themselves are compelling, but it takes a reader with Goldberg’s dual background as a practitioner and an interdisciplinary, collaborative scholar to bring these grainy, silent images to crackling life. Goldberg painstakingly identifies the various shadowy figures in the screenshots, drawing upon an in-depth knowledge of performance practices and characters during the period; she pinpoints the various palos or dance styles, referring to dance manuals, historical accounts, and her own practice. Then, unexpectedly, she deduces their musical rhythm, and she does so, more unexpectedly still, by reaching out to another artist, as we read in footnote 29: “Guitarist Curro de María, looking at the guitarists’ hands, helped me identify the rhythms and tonalities” (239). Not content to stop at incorporating the acoustic detail into her written research, Goldberg mentions a footnote later that she has “added a rhythm soundtrack of palmas and a visual box showing the counts to the first and third Macarrona clips, at both 50% and 100% speed (which is slowed down slightly to compensate for the fewer frames per second in 1917 film technology). The modified clips have been donated and will be available at the New York Library for the Performing Arts” (Ibid.). These two footnotes speak volumes about the kind of research behind this extraordinary piece of dance scholarship: it is at one and the same time historical, technical, creative, corporeal, musical, visual, and collaborative, and it is as generous as it will undoubtedly be generative.

Sonidos Negros draws upon its author’s many years of dance practice, but also her research across several centuries of literary texts, dance manuals, performance paraphernalia, visual records, and musical scores from different but interlocking geographical sites. Ostensibly focused on flamenco, the book’s canvas stretches far beyond what the reader might expect; it offers a mapping of dance practices to and fro across the black and brown Atlantic, detailing the negotiations around issues of race, class, gender, and empire being worked out in under-studied forms of dance. Sonidos Negros brings those movements back to life by rescuing them and putting them in their temporal and spatial context—a context, often, of forced migrations—showing us not just the now, but the before and after of a gesture. Like Susan Jones’s (2013, 156) insistent reading of Kurtz’s African mistress’s gesture as a movement-sequence rather than a still image, Goldberg’s readings insist on dance’s inscription in the places and histories from which it emerges, its generation of future responses and responsibilities. This is dance scholarship at its liveliest and most resonant, an interdisciplinary, multisite sounding of a chain of texts and images and stories for their movements, their transmissions, their eloquent equivocations. What emerges, in Goldberg’s clear and vibrant writing, is a history of Spanish—but not only Spanish—dance in its entanglements with questions of race, religion, class, ethnicity, geopolitics, pain, and pleasure.

The title of Goldberg’s book is drawn from poet Federico García Lorca’s resonant meditations on duende, on the event of performance as...