How to dance flamenco, flamenco travel in Spain, flamenco dance students and their experiences, interviews with flamenco artists, translations of flamenco letras (songs) from Spanish to English
Viewing entries tagged
student experience
Do you practice as much as you’d like to? What about simply showing up for class? How do you make time for flamenco in your life?
The following interview with Jackie Pasciak, flamenco dancer from Portland, Oregon, is packed full of gems and a must listen for students.
Jackie and I did this interview as we navigate shelter in place life during the height of the Coronavirus.
“What keeps me in flamenco is my flamenco community. When I’m away from flamenco for awhile the people and the community and the sense of supporting each other…is what I really miss and what always brings me back.”
Learn about Julie’s flamenco journey in this interview where she shares everything from how she got started to how she finds time for it in busy life to what she finds most challenging about flamenco. She even shares some advice for her fellow flamenco learners…
How did you find flamenco?
This is one of my favorite things to ask flamenco lovers.
I love learning people’s flamenco stories, don’t you?
Debby, one of the students on the last fall’s Flamenco Tour to Jerez sent me this summary of her experience a few days upon returning home with this note. “Thank you again for a 100% approval trip. Here is how I truly felt.” If you’re curious about what happens on the Flamenco Tour, read on:
"I want to be in class with Mercedes ALL of the time." That is what I wrote in my journal on April 13, 2011.
But let's go back in time.
I arrived in Jerez on Friday, March 25 and began investigating classes to take.
Though secretly, I did not want to go to any.
A week in Jerez by myself.
I was a junior in college. I was studying Spanish. Class was a struggle for me to say the least. The professor spoke only in Spanish, and I usually felt like a Charlie Brown adult was mwoah mwoah mwoahing at me all of the time. I can't even remember her name, the teacher's. I just remember she was eccentric, as they say, and that we went to her house once and she made us all mole. She was not Mexican but totally and completely obsessed. The mole was good enough. Anyway every day we would watch this "educational" novela and then answer questions about and "discuss" it. I rarely knew what was going on in class or with Raquel and El Padre Hidalgo on the TV set. Just one word sticks out in my mind, excavación. The whole novela had to do with some big excavation. So, why am I telling you all of this? Because a really good thing happened on account of that class with Señora Something-or-Other...
I became interested in flamenco.
"I want to be in class with Mercedes ALL of the time." That is what I wrote in my journal on April 13. But let's go back in time.
I came back to Jerez on Friday, March 25 and began investigating classes to take.
But I secretly didn't want to go to any.
A week in Jerez by myself. Poor planning by Laura. When will I learn that it simply is not fun for me to do these things alone? A week spent looking for studios, making calls, trying to understand when and where the different classes took place, feeling relief as I kept arriving at the wrong times and missing them. There is a semi-funny reason for this, but you'll have to wait to hear about it in a future post...I would like to say that this was on account of Spanish unpredictability, but it wasn't.
![Just Keep Showing Up | Flamenco Student Stories [Jackie]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/568079e7bfe873f15c115eee/1587505862489-V0F76JZTRPATFVU1RC6T/IMG_6229.jpg)
![My Flamenco Community Keeps Me In It | Flamenco Student Stories [Julie]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/568079e7bfe873f15c115eee/1586767354689-6SWCKCGGP6BHOJO1MZYQ/IMG_6251.jpg)
