Cabaret Flamenco - Espace Culturel Du Vieux Lyon

Cabaret Flamenco at Espace culturel du Vieux Lyon

We are delighted to welcome Cabaret Flamenco to the intimate stage of Espace culturel du Vieux Lyon, a venue where stone vaults, warm acoustics, and close-up sightlines bring the art of flamenco within arm’s reach. Set in the heart of the Old Town, our space is designed for encounters as much as performances: the audience’s breath, the guitarist’s rasgueados, the singer’s lament, and the dancer’s heelwork all converge in a direct, unamplified dialogue that is rare in larger halls. Cabaret Flamenco thrives in this proximity. Every palmas accent, every jaleo, and every flash of bata de cola comes alive with immediacy, allowing spectators to read the smallest shift of expression and the living conversation between cante, guitarra, and baile. In our venue, the show’s spirit of improvisation—the call-and-response that is the heartbeat of the art—finds a natural home, turning each performance into a unique moment shared by artists and audience alike.

Artistic highlights and season context

From our vantage point as host, Cabaret Flamenco arrives at an inspiring moment in the season, with the ensemble shaping a program that pairs rigorous tradition with contemporary color. Expect a journey through essential palos—soleá, seguiriyas, tangos, alegrías, and bulerías—filtered through the artists’ current research into timbre, rhythm, and dramaturgy. The evening’s dramaturgy favors contrast: intimate cante jondo against crisp zapateado, austere a cappella passages swelling into full compás, and bare-bones toque blossoming into rich falsetas. In recent months, the company has honed fresh arrangements and original choreographic sketches that highlight interplay rather than solo bravura, allowing the guitarist’s ornament, the cajón’s earthy pulse, and the dancer’s taconeo to trade foreground and background like partners in a conversation. Our team has shaped a lighting plot in warm amber and smoky blues that complements the textures of mantón fringes and the sweep of bata de cola, while the room’s natural resonance gives the voice space to bloom without losing the raw grain that makes flamenco so arresting. Audiences who follow the local scene will notice how this edition of Cabaret Flamenco leans into spontaneity—cortes extended by a glance, remates sharpened by a shouted “¡olé!”, and finales that invite a festive fin de fiesta spirit unique to nights when everything and everyone is in sync.

As presenters, we value how Cabaret Flamenco also reflects today’s creative currents, bridging reverence for lineage with an openness to new textures. The program’s tientos-tangos arc, for instance, allows the cantaor or cantaora to linger over text and breath, before sliding into dance-forward tangos where the compás grips the floorboards and sets the scene for quicksilver footwork. Fandangos de Huelva bring a brighter, coastal lift; seguiriyas carve out the evening’s darker, more solemn center; alegrías restore buoyancy with crisp escobillas and radiant shawl work. You can expect refined palmas patterns, nuanced heelwork that shifts pressure and tone like a percussionist, and guitar lines that move from austere phrygian bite to lyrical release. The artists’ current preoccupation with texture shows in their use of silence—those halts before a llamada that feel like a held breath—and in their layering of palmas, cajón, and tacón so that rhythm becomes architecture. Our stage configuration keeps the musicians close to the dancers, reinforcing the music’s circular energy and the sense that each cuadro is a microcosm of the flamenco family. In this cabaret format, surprise is part of the design: a sudden cambio de letra, an unplanned subida, or a playful bulerías de cierre that draws the whole company into the spotlight. Here at Espace culturel du Vieux Lyon, the old stones support the new pulse, and Cabaret Flamenco turns that resonance into a living, communal night of art.