The Voice

Flamenco, along with Chinese opera, are, perhaps, my preferred forms of entertainment because each is about the voice as theatre. You can’t fake the sincerity of the voice. (One reason my flesh crawls around girls with no “balls in the voice,” as Jane Fonda described it, is because they’re projecting some male idea of woman as baby, not woman as herself. To accept this limitation while wearing one’s Tory Burch flats is a crime against nature–and the soul of my ears.) The voice can, at times, find itself in interpretation–text, musical measures, etc–but its basis is itself; you can’t have different lungs. You can strengthen them, or damage them smoking crack, but they are all yours, and only once. When it comes to the power of the voice–it’s theatre–the great flamenco singer, El Arenero, let’s us know that make believe and passion are true things, in the way that a Borges story is true: in it’s being believed. He is interpreting stories for us, but he is himself; notice how he sits in the chair and makes the chair a part of his body and then he stops singing when his body runs out of the story. Carmen Armaya, a flamenco singer I can never get over, was also a dancer so, she used her voice as she used her feet: to drive nails into the floor, and into our heart. Was she afraid that we would forget her once the performance was all over and her lungs were momentarily stilled? Might be, probably. The fear of being forgotten can add to, damage, or derange a performer’s life let alone lung work and stage work, but that’s why we watch, and why we listen: surely the desperation and hope we see in one human deserves the attention of another.