With flamenco singer Marina Heredia (Flamenco Festival New York), dancer, choreographer, writer, and organizer Paloma McGregor (Angela’s Pulse, Dancing While Black), Latina/o cultural theorist Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis), artist and performance theorist Sebastian Calderón Bentin (NYU Tisch School of the Arts), and flamenco dancer and scholar K. Meira Goldberg (CUNY Grad Center, Fashion Institute of Technology.)

Historically, flamenco artistry was generated as a dazzling, resistant response to the discrimination and poverty endured by the Roma of Spain and other marginalized communities in Andalusia. Today, flamenco is marked not only by its inheritance of loss and art but by the multiple forces of culture, diaspora, identity, politics, and market. This panel asks questions to reframe the life and futures of flamenco. We will consider how contemporary flamenco artists negotiate the fine line between embracing an artistic inheritance and breaking free of stereotype. Can flamenco survive in the fullness of its profound and deep expression without being boxed in by obligatory sorrow and suffering? What will the new sources of inspiration be for the generations of artists who have not known the suffering of their ancestors? How does flamenco’s evolution in the context of globalized 21st century culture reflect changing ideas about gender and race? How do today’s artists beat a path to the future, finding new and authentic creative impetus?