Flamenco Chicago Press Coverage

Flamenco Chicago in the News
Here's what the Chicago Tribune had to say about classes at Flamenco Chicago. The story gives a good idea of what it's like to start flamenco classes as a beginner with no previous dance training, and really describes the excitement of the student recital performance experience. However, the reporter went a little overboard in emphasizing the difficulty she perceived. Beginning class choreographies are quite simple (but do require some practice), and are especially easy for those with a little prior dance background, so please don't think that flamenco would be too difficult for you. I think the writer was trying to add drama and excitement to her story, and as a non-dancer herself, was surprised at how much I'm actually able to get my students to do. (In case you have trouble reading the facsimile of the story, scroll down for a text version.)

Also, you can go to a student's journal of her flamenco class experiences while the subject of the Tribune story.

The big reveal
By Trine Tsouderos
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 14, 2006

Women in long skirts and stage makeup are flitting about backstage, their faces shining with excitement and nervousness and concentration. It's five performances into a dance recital at St. Patrick Performing Arts Centre in the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood.

Just offstage are four women in matching ruffled black skirts, black leotard tops, pink and blue shawls, and shoes that look like Mary Janes, except tiny nails are tapped into their soles and heels. Their hair is pulled back into buns and decorated with white daisies and plastic combs.

These four are the night's beginners, just moments from performing a two-minute flamenco dance in front of 300 people.

One is more of a beginner than the others: Anamaria Haefelin, a 37-year-old mother of two from Beverly who took up this supremely complicated dance just six weeks before.

She is practically levitating with nerves now.

"I just learned two things are wrong with my dance," Anamaria says. Her eyes are wide. Panic.

She breaks away from the other women to practice--again. Her heels click on the floor like gunfire. Stomp, stomp, heel. Stomp, stomp, heel stomp, stomp, stomp.

The risk of a flamenco meltdown is high.

Offstage, a speaker is announcing the group, explaining how Anamaria got here, how she won an At Play contest in which the newspaper promised to make her dream come true in six weeks, how her dream was to learn to dance flamenco.

The audience, which contains 25 of Anamaria's family and friends, erupts into cheers as the music, a bright rumba flamenco, fills the auditorium.

Anamaria's two minutes have come--the culmination of dozens of hours of practice, a pulled neck muscle, dance classes, driving to dance class, anxiety and probably worst of all, being followed around by a reporter, a videographer and a photographer.

She gives her fellow dancers a quick motherly squeeze before they flutter through the velvety sidestage curtains, leaving the cozy darkness and the endless practicing and the might haves, should haves and could haves for the stark light of the stage.

- - -

Rewind six weeks to another dimly lit place--a dance studio in the basement of a Belmont-Cragin bungalow. The room is intimate and festive, thanks to twinkle lights reflecting in a mirror covering one wall.

In the middle of this space is Anamaria. She is petite, extraordinarily fit, with a hammy, infectious smile. She wears her dark hair in an angled, longish cut. She is a hip, hot mama.

Rosetta Magdalen, a professional flamenco dancer, is the intense owner of Flamenco Chicago, one of the city's few schools dedicated to the art form.

Right now, Magdalen is attempting to feed Anamaria enough flamenco in one hour to enable her to keep up with a beginners' class that starts as soon as this private lesson ends. The class, which gathers for an hour twice a week, has already met six times.

The specific dance she will learn--a light and festive rumba flamenco--happens to be a serendipitous choice for Anamaria.

A combination of Latin American rumba and Spanish flamenco, it is a mirror of Anamaria herself, who was born in Colombia.

Violence and instability prompted Anamaria's parents to move the family to the United States when she was 3. Raising her children, Anamaria's mother did not emphasize Spanish or their Colombian heritage. "I was very Americanized," Anamaria says.

When she was 20, Anamaria traveled to Spain hoping to recapture her Spanish. It was there that she fell in love with flamenco, though it remained unrequited love--until now.

Magdalen starts by teaching Anamaria how to hold herself. Pull in your abs, she says. Lift up your chest. Keep your front knee bent.

"You want to give the impression you may move at any time, but they don't know when you will move," Magdalen says. "There's always an element of surprise."

Magdalen pulls herself into the stance. She looks like a proud peacock with the coiled power of a tiger ready to pounce. "You want to stand like this every moment of your class," she says.

Anamaria attempts the stance. She looks a little awkward and uncomfortable.

Magdalen adds another element. She rolls her shoulders forward, kicking her elbows out slightly. She begins to raise her arms over her head as she rotates her wrists. It is a beautiful, seductive movement.

"This," she says as she seduces the mirror, "is your basic `Letter A' arm movement."

Anamaria raises her arms, twirling her hands. She gets the basic movement but she is missing the grace, the fluidity, the seduction.

"Did you find that easy?" Magdalen asks.

"No," Anamaria says. Her face has the look of a person facing a long line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. "But I found it learnable."

Magdalen takes a look at her: "You look like someone who will practice."

- - -

Really, it would have been difficult for Anamaria to find a harder dance to learn. Ballet, perhaps.

"When people are looking for something recreational, they look to salsa or belly-dancing," Magdalen says. "Flamenco is enjoyable, but . . . "

Take up waltzing, and you're going to focus mainly on your feet and your partner.

But try flamenco, with its Spanish-gypsy roots, and you're going to be twirling your fingers while rotating your hands, while turning your wrists, while raising and lowering your arms while, perhaps, stomping out an intricate rhythm with your feet so fast it sounds like gunfire and maybe, at the same time, clapping or marking a beat with chattering castanets.

All the while you will be attempting to emote something besides the laserlike focus required to pull all of this off. Maybe you will be attempting to emote melancholy while doing all of this.

Or yearning. Yearning for the dance to come easily.

- - -

Three weeks later, Anamaria is at her bungalow on a leafy street in Beverly.

She now possesses a long black flamenco skirt with a flouncy ruffle at the bottom, a tight black leotard and the shoes with the tiny nails--and a glimmer of confidence.

She has been practicing for hours in addition to two hours of regular classes a week and the occasional private lesson. She practices in her bedroom, in front of a full-length mirror, while her kids, Nate, 6, and Josh, 3, are at school.

Today, the kids are home but busy playing. She shows off her moves--the two-minute choreographed dance she will perform during a recital a month later.

At the end of the six weeks, she will have run through this dance a hundred times. But now, with the performance still weeks away, she is still learning it.

Her level of commitment astonishes Magdalen.

"One time she came in and said, `I only put in four hours of practice this week,'" Magdalen says. "If I can get the average student to practice 10 minutes a week, that's a lot."

But nobody who knows Anamaria is surprised. She is an unusually dogged person.

"When she gets something in her head, she attacks," says her husband, David Haefelin.

Anamaria agrees. "I'm a bulldog," she says. "I bite in and I don't let go."

- - -

There are just 12 days until the performance and Anamaria is juggling her boys and contractors overhauling one of her bathrooms.

She's also stressed out about the recital.

"I am terrified," she says. "I don't know how I am going to be."

But can she compartmentalize?

"Not really," she says. "I will have to. I have no choice. I will have to do it or I will look like an idiot. It is either compartmentalize or make mistakes."

She is better now at executing turns, a major bugaboo for some weeks, and her timing is improving.

She wishes she had done this years ago.

"Why did I wait 15 years to do this?" she asks during a conversation a few weeks earlier. "It isn't that much money. It isn't that much time. I was so wrapped up in finding a job and having the right job and hanging out with my friends."

She is asking a question many of us have asked of ourselves: Where did all of the time go?

"I really wish I had started earlier," she says. "I say make it happen because you only have so long to live in this life."

Back at the auditorium, Anamaria has just walked onstage with fellow beginners (and Chicagoans) Shiwali Varshney, Daniela Bueno and Janira Monterroso. They are walking in a line and clapping to the rumba flamenco music, which is bright, exciting.

Two minutes and counting until the end of the dance.

If they are nervous, it doesn't really show. Their movements are fluid, mostly crisp.

The only hint of jangled nerves is in their faces, which wear half-thawed smiles some of the time, looks of fierce concentration at other times and, at the end, a patina of relief and joy.

Now they are swishing their skirts back and forth. There is complicated heelwork--stomp, stomp, heel. Stomp, Stomp, heel.

Now the turns. Oh, the turns. Four in a row, while moving, and while synchronizing with the other dancers.

Anamaria executes hers well. Hours of practice have paid off.

The dance is wrapping up now. It has been a success--Anamaria, Shiwali, Daniela and Janira have captured the music's lightness, brightness and sense of fun.

Someone says "ee!"--the signal to exit the stage, and they leave to roaring applause.

Offstage, they are elated and self-critical.

"I felt like I did horrible!" Anamaria says, though she is ecstatic and happy. "I felt like my face was molting into something horrible."

She mimes a face that looks like it is melting. "The best part? Running off the stage!"

Still, the women are hugging and laughing. "That was so much fun!" Anamaria says.

After the recital, Anamaria finds her family and friends, who are waiting to embrace her. "She was great," her husband says.

This is, she says, just the beginning.

"I know I am going to keep doing it," she says. Her smile is enormous.

"It takes so much time to learn--you can't learn it all in six weeks! But it's thrilling because it's a start for me."

A flamenco dancer in the making
(Anamaria's journal)

Oct. 24
I was very excited to be starting on my new Flamenco adventure. It began with a private lesson by Rosetta of Flamenco Chicago. She is a tall thin beautiful woman who knows her stuff. We started off with some simple step and hand techniques. While watching her in the mirror I was able to mimic the moves mostly because she kept the tempo at a slow pace. It was definitely a lot of information to take in one hour but I kept my mind open.

When the class came, I could tell that their three weeks worth of instruction was full of improvement. Especially if they all started at a beginner level. So there was light at the end of the tunnel. One girl in the class with prior dance experience is awesome.

On my way home all I kept thinking was "Why didn't I start this 10 years ago" I could be great right now at the age of 37 and possibly in the fairly large Chicago Flamenco circuit. Oh well, better late than never.

Oct. 26
I was able to bring my camcorder to record our 2nd private lesson. It is a major bonus because I soon found out that when I got home to start practicing I was not sure if I was practicing the right steps!

The footwork of the class seems simple at first but when you try and speed it up to a normal pace even the most simplest of steps become difficult. I was able to practice with my new Flamenco shoes. They are quite comfortable with nails on the heels and toes. I did not realize how the dance is almost a different cultures take on tap dancing. Or more logical is that we took tap dancing from flamenco.

Oct. 30
Trine and I went for the skirt today…and just in time because she introduced the skirt movement with the footing. This was probably the most humble day because I certainly do not have the footwork down pat and with the skirt movement thrown in I felt completely lost. I do not think that I practiced enough over the weekend and it shows. I definitely felt like the worst in the class with a lot more to learn.

Hopefully the next class will be better. I am going to make it a goal to practice at least an hour every day.

Nov. 1
I went in for one more private lesson because there are four turns that occur in a row in the dance and I am horrible at them. After about 25 minutes she gave me excellent tips and I was able to do them a lot better. What a relief… I was starting to think that I just did not have it in me. My heel work still needs improvement and so do my "flores" which is the hand movement. All I can do is practice so we will see. We are going away this weekend with the kids to celebrate my father in law's Retirement of 40 years to Caterpillar. We all are very proud of him. So I do not think I will get much practice in.

Nov. 6
I got back from my weekend and while watching TV I practiced my hand movements… and something just clicked! I was so excited because I went from feeling extremely awkward to " hey, I am actually getting this!" I still have a way to go but I am definitely seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

At class today we went over more of the Sevillanas with a partner. It is so much fun learning it…I can't believe it has taken me 15 years to get my butt up and actually take the steps to do something I love so much! Why oh Why did it take me so long? I am 37 years old and am finally coming to the conclusion that I can really do just about anything if I just take pro active steps to do it. I may not be the best at it but it's the process of learning that is actually so much fun. The moments when you finally "get" something you have been struggling with…your own personal milestone with something you truly enjoy. Could I actually become a good flamenco dancer? I think so!!

Nov. 16
Today was strange because there was one girl who missed the last class and was a bit lost and another girl who missed a few classes due to a sprained ankle hence… I was actually the best one in the group!!! It felt great to have come from the back of the class where I hid because I was so clueless to the front of the class and actually knowing what I was doing. Another small milestone!

Sunday we are having a special practice to drill in our upcoming dance routine. There will be four of us participating in it! I can't wait.

Nov. 28
My class yesterday went great. I am very confident about the dance and just need to tweak a couple more things. We have class tomorrow and afterward the girls and I are going to get together to practice more. We are going to be in our full garb to test things out - like the little shawls ( montoncillos ). We certainly do not want any Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunctions!

We are also going to dance the Sevillanas at the end of the show. She is going to ask old students in the audience to come on stage to dance too... so it could quite possibly turn out to be total mayhem. Since I am not that strong of a Sevillana dancer the more distractions the better.

Rosetta seems to be getting more stressed the closer it comes to everyones performance. A lot rests on her shoulders since every dance is her choreography and also her teaching. She is very good though at just letting us be our bad selves and telling us that if you make a mistake just pretend like it did not happen with a big smile on your face.

Dec. 12
The day of the performance can be summed up in one simple word..FUN. The girls in my dance and I got ready together... put on our hair combs so they would be on just right, made sure our lipstick was loud enough, adjusted our skirt lengths, added last minute flowers. It was like getting ready before the prom with a group of close friends. Of course we practiced our butts off while backstage. We would practice alone, in pairs, and with the total group of four. I also enjoyed the celebrity status of having a full time reporter there jotting down my every word, a camera woman capturing stolen shots while I practiced in a remote hallway, and a cute cameraman interviewing me after each milestone ( the final dress rehearsal, just before I went on stage, afterwards). I to was just so much fun.

I did not truly become nervous until about 8 minutes before I knew I had to go on stage. I knew that I had practiced all that I could and whatever would be would have to be. What I was not prepared for was the absolute terror that I felt once I got on stage and saw all the people!! I felt that I completely froze... I felt that my face was contorting from all my nervousness... I knew that I blew some steps but by the end of the dance I felt that I was returning to normal. We flew off the stage and were all pretty sure that it turned out absolutely horrible! But... those folks from the trib reassured us that it looked great! Sure it did...but I was not so sure. It was a blur. It happened so fast. The final moment was thrilling but I was too nervous to really appreciate it.

The real thrill for me was the path I took to get there. Pouring my heart out in my essay, receiving the call from Trine telling me that I was among the finalists, researching teachers, buying the flamenco shoes, skirt and shirt, creating a makeshift studio in my bedroom, having my oldest watch me practice and then demonstrate the steps for show and tell, feeling nervous when my husband would peek his head in to watch me dance, and comments from my mom of how proud she was of me. I learned that if I put my mind to it, I could learn anything. The possibilities are endless.

I have signed up for the next class. I plan on doing this until I am not nervous anymore on stage.