The hidden Jewish origins in flamenco

Last year Sydney dancer and choreographer Annalouise Paul received a fellowship from New York’s Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture to research and perform a combined dance-theatre work called Self Portrait.

The work is both an exploration of Paul's own identity and heritage, and a research project into the deep connections between flamenco and Jewish culture.

The dance, music, song and rhythm of flamenco draws on the rich multicultural mix of southern Spain. “Every flamenco book and every flamenco person says flamenco has Arabic, Jewish and African influences,” says Paul. But she wants to know exactly how Jewish, “because nobody has actually done that”.

Paul’s research is also personal: she’s been dancing flamenco and grappling with identity for decades.

Paul’s Ashkenazi mother was born in England and her Sephardi-Mizrahi father in Calcutta. Paul’s early years were spent immersed in Sydney’s Jewish community. (Her family also lived in Israel for a short time after making aliyah; they returned to Australia.) But after her parents divorced when she was 10, Paul moved to western Sydney with her mother and four siblings; far from the heart of the Jewish community. She never really got to know her father.

At 19, Paul discovered flamenco. Or as she prefers to put it, flamenco found her. As a child, Paul loved to dance but she only began formal lessons as an adult. At first, Paul danced contemporary and ballet. A year later, she saw a chalkboard sign outside a dance studio on Sydney’s Pitt Street with one word: ‘flamenco’. “And that was it, it felt so right,” she says. That was almost 40 years ago, and Paul has been dancing flamenco and contemporary – in what she describes as a “bilingual practice” – ever since.