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It's about the man who comes to nothing. The man who's the outsider. The tragedy. Flamenco's informed by a lot of things. Flamenco's informed by the sky in Spain. I even studied bullfighting there, because that was part of it for me.

You studied in Spain for a couple of years.

I think by the time I was 17, I was back in New York dancing. I couldn't handle it. I always had a group of about four people and one guitarist, and I was just too crazy as a kid. I was too angry.

So you were leading your own troupe.

Yeah, but I was too temperamental. I didn't have any patience with what they couldn't do. I was an asshole.

Do you still listen to flamenco music?

Oh yeah! It's never ceased to do the same thing, just like it did to me in the '50s.

What is it about this music that really grabs people -- that seems to be operating beneath the words in the songs?

In Spanish, one single word can have such reverberations in a romantic or spiritual way. Our language doesn't own that kind of darkness. The language doesn't quite have the snakebite; there's a duality in Spanish. In flamenco, if you hear a siguiriya, something goes through the body. It makes me think that it's something that goes so far back, that unconsciously you're responding to something primitive. When I see some of the snakelike grace of that Indian dancing, it's the same thing that's talking to somebody who responds deeply to flamenco. A lot of people don't respond to it.

Some of my friends call it toothache music.

I know a guy who heard flamenco for the first time at my house. He was like a dog who heard his master's voice. Americans are afraid of it. I think probably they're just guys who are afraid of sex.

What are you listening to?

I've got a lot of old stuff. I've got some live stuff from the South -- those guys really get me. And I love Paco de Lucia.

There seems to be an ongoing renaissance with flamenco in Spain that started about the time you were there.

I didn't think it would happen; I thought it was going to die. In the late '50s, I thought: Too bad for flamenco, the modern world is going to crush it out of existence. But then it popped up. The flamenco that I was doing was really born around the turn of the century.

Was your ambition ever to just stay in Spain and be a dancer?

I think I was too young. I was so young emotionally. By the time I got to L.A., I was involved in other things. I thought, I want to write, I want to direct, act.

Does the flamenco experience inform what you're doing now?

I imagine so, because the same thing that attracted me to flamenco is something inside me that finds expression in other ways, and it's a darkness. It's something that's open-ended, it's not so pat -- you know, three acts and here's the hero. I think there's a wildness that attracts me, that is flamenco-like. There's a speech that Lorca gave in Cuba, that is the best definition of what this is all about. It was an essay on duende, before he came to New York.

Getting back to the present, have you ever thought about doing a film involving flamenco?

Yeah, I'm doing it. I can't write it right now, so we've been looking for a writer who would understand what the story is, and I would like to direct it. It's about an American, a businessman who thinks he's going on a vacation. He's in a traffic jam on his way to East Hampton, and he hears Paco de Lucia, or something. So he goes to study for a week, and he goes down the vortex and winds up in Jerez de la Frontera and gets fucked up.

Does he have to get fucked up?

Well, it's flamenco -- and he gets waylaid. We're working on it right now.
salon.com | Oct. 2, 1999

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