The pleasure in moving: drawing the space through flamenco bodies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article develops an analysis of flamenco performance and religious processions in Andalusia by deploying and extending Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of drawing, using the results of extensive ethnographic field research completed by the author among the Roma community in southern Spain. The article demonstrates how the Gitano body becomes a corpus of drawing, in Nancy’s sense, through a performance of tracing. The logic of this trace entails an originary intermingling of time and space, as well as a structural overlapping of the animate and the inanimate. Far from being purely abstract, such tracing is read as the choreographed self-portraiture of the Gitano community itself. The author argues that the performers and ethnographic researcher meet and intersect in a shared space of extension. In this sense, the tracing of flamenco bodies parallels the performative dimension of auto-ethnographic writing.