Directed by María Pagés and El Arbi El Harti, Paraíso de los negros is a flamenco choreography that draws its lifeblood from the essence of Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York and the novel of the same title by Carl Van Vechten.
Blackness here is a semantically allied echo in which the same eternal conflicts resound—those that keep Humanity hostage to its own asymmetrical nature.
Paraíso de los negros is a work about the perpetual search for happiness. It explores human limits and limitations which, taking on different faces, stain and obstruct the path toward the right to desire; it examines figures and appearances, always fluid and elusive, that suffocate free will, and it dialogues with the barriers imposed like a guillotine upon the neck of utopias, or like images, thoughts, and feelings that rise as unstoppable walls to render the Other invisible.
The Other as an extension of desire, not as an enemy. Here, Lorca’s principle of freedom is a bird trapped on a twig smeared with glue.
Paraíso de los negros is a flamenco work built around choreography, music, singing, lighting, scenography, costume design, and a dramaturgical narrative that tells of the tension generated by limits, limitations, borders, and both real and symbolic threats and cornerings, and their resulting violence upon human consciousness.
The rhythm of the work seeks the calm of the desired equilibrium of a shared home. Yet it is inspired by arrhythmia, anomalies, disorder, and asymmetry—the sources of existential anguish that lead us to claim life and coexistence as our inviolable fundamental rights.
Paraíso de los negros is a Bedouin carpet conceived by wise elder women. The ethical and aesthetic components that structure it are stitched together by an organic semantic and emotional connection. This deep complicity weaves its principles and the symbols that sustain it, always pursuing the longed-for reconciliation of the One.
