Vicente Escudero conceived the idea of dancing without music, but at the same time it is something intrinsic to flamenco, because the dancer’s own body is the music. He came up with this idea thirty years before Merce Cunningham carried out the great revolution of dancing without music. When Escudero performed in New York in the 1930s with rhythmic pieces without musical accompaniment, critics praised him enthusiastically. Then things happened: Vicente Escudero returned to Spain and faded from view, but in New York he had been celebrated as an extraordinary and highly radical artist.

The dancer presents himself as the master of his own space, which is a crucial aspect of modernity: he no longer depends even on music to construct his work on stage. What would later become one of the great revolutions in dance after the Second World War had already been achieved by a flamenco artist. Moreover, it was something that belonged to the very nature of flamenco itself.

Realizing this is what allows Israel not to feel any sense of inferiority, to speak to modern artists as an equal. In 2007, he performed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao with Sol Picó and contemporary dance artists. I have friends who are dance specialists who had never seen him before, and they called me saying, “This guy has completely outclassed them all.” Everyone else—the supposed modernists—seemed archaic by comparison.

(Pedro G. Romero)