Final Flamenco Collaborations for 2011!

Las Guitarras de España presents "Flamenco Collaborations Series" featuring Spanish guitar-based music and dance as a foundation for artistic dialogues between artists from Indian, African, and Arabic music traditions. Chicago's rich cultural diversity provides a backdrop for the final show in a five concert series. This format, presented at Mayne Stage in Chicago, will allow artists to create new work together and to present th...ese materials to audiences in an excellent venue.

Repertoire:
Set 1. Mehran is an Iranian Flamenco guitarist who lives in Chicago. His recent album "Angels of Persepolis" is a mixture of Flamenco and Middle Eastern-influenced music. His CD release performance was featured in the Chicago Flamenco Festival in 2011 and included two sold out shows at the Old Town School of Folk Music and Chicago Cultural Center. For this performance Mehran and his group will be introducing some of his newer compositions.

Set 2. Syrian cellist Kinan Abou-afach presents original compositions showing some traditional Middle Eastern traditions, on cello and oud. The influences will be gypsies in the Syrian mountains.

Set 3. From the Arctic to the Middle East: Broken Narratives by an American Flamenco Dancer. Over the past two years, flamenco dancer Wendy Clinard has collected and arranged written scraps of natural and human histories taken from recent travels, books and random encounters. These writings are integrated with original music composed by violinist Steve Gibons and live video projections by Marco Ferrari. Each chapter asks about the individual’s place in the buried generations of humans and eternity. The disparate sections, true stories, facts, ideas, sounds and movements merge to create a complex picture of our world challenged by the larger contexts we live amongst. This work will complete the "Las Guitarras de España presents Flamenco Collaborations at Mayne Stage 2011 series."