Vicente Escudero conceived the idea of dance without music, but on the other hand it’s something intrinsic to flamenco because the music is the body of the bailaor itself. And he conceived it thirty years before Merce Cunningham performed the great revolution of dance without music. And when he appeared in New York in the thirties using rhythms without music the reviews were excellent. Later things happen, Vicente Escudero came back to Spain, disappeared, but there they celebrate it like something amazing, a truly radical artist. The ballet dancer appeared as the true owner of the stage – that’s something very important in the vanguard, that you don’t depend on the music to build a project on stage. That – one of the greatest dance revolutions since the Second World War – happened first in flamenco. And on top of that, it forms part of the idiosyncrasy of flamenco itself. If you take that on board then you’ll understand why Israel has no hang-ups, he can speak to modern artists as an equal. When in 2007 he went to the Guggenheim in Bilbao with Sol Picó and modern dance. I have friends who specialize in dance who’d never seen him and they called me saying ‘this guy has everybody talking about him.’ All the others that were supposedly modern looked archaic alongside him. (Pedro G. Romero)