What is some of the basic terminology that fans of flamenco music and dance should be familiar with?
The most famous one, the one that everybody knows is olé. This is a cheer like “come on.” Most of the time, you use it to encourage the performers or the students. In the art itself, there is palmas, which is handclapping. It is a very important aspect of flamenco. It is very important, very complicated—most people would think that doing handclapping/palmas would be very basic. There are actually very few people in the world or here in the United States who can do handclapping for flamenco. Baile is the dance, cante is the singing, and toque is the guitar playing. Those phrases are always associated with flamenco. There is one very important one: duende. Duende has different meanings. One of the meanings is for when there is a performance that is so incredible that the spirit of the artist is carried through the audience. Then they say that is duende. Duende means “ghost,” meaning that there is a ghost that takes over the whole theater, because the artists are so into the music that it
