Category Archives: Garth Martens

Poet active on Victoria’s Flamenco Scene

By Garth Martens

Flamenco derives from the south of Spain, a distinctly gitano or gypsy phenomenon with Moorish, Judaic, and Catholic influence. An innovative art form requiring practised improvisation as well as craft, it was passed down through oral transmission rather than sheet music.  In fact, efforts to set it down on paper reduce its complexity. Flamenco’s rhythm structures are assertive, the singing voices rough as salt, and the dancing marked by intensities of emotion, the killer look, and sections of percussive footwork that rap like thunder on the floor. Dancers imitate manoeuvrings of the bull or the matador with dramatic arm gestures and little flores of the hands.Flamenco isn’t about looking sexy, but about passion: a passion inflected with anger, love, dread, cheekiness, grief, and pride. Always pride.

Six years ago, I began as a student with Alma de España, Victoria’s singular water-shed for flamenco dance, guitar, and cante, founded twenty-three years ago by Veronica Maguire and Harry Owen. My priority then was to study the singing and immerse myself in the rhythm as a palmero, someone who supports the basic accents, an articulate clapping, while the dancers or singers are free to weave their syncopations.

I was hooked within my first year of study, but only in the last year have I felt, for the first time, like a dancer.  Some intervening blockage has slipped away so I learn the choreography much faster — my ear and my feet in alignment. As well, this discipline gives me personal sustenance, transforms a troubled emotion into a brightness, not by sweetening it or simplifying it, but through a rightful sweat. Many dancers I know admit to confronting inner obstructions in every new choreography. Some of them, to tune themselves to the particular piece, will draw on archetypes, images that ride within their bodies as they dance. Flamenco cultivates the vast inner multitude and favours the intricate over the reductive.

I’ll be working with Alma de España this winter in preparation for Pasajes, a major production slated for July 12, 2014, at the Royal Theatre. Canadian artists include Veronica Maguire (dancer), Gareth Owen (flamenco guitarist), JoAnn Dalisay (pianist/composer), and me(poet). Among those coming directly from Spain are Domingo Ortega (dancer), María Bermúdez (dancer), and Jesús Álvarez (flamenco guitarist). While this is Veronica’s personal story, it’s also mine and yours, resonant with shared passages of life, death, and regeneration. I’ve been contracted to write original English-language poetry, which I’ll perform live as part of the show. Advanced student dancers and singers, accompanied by guitarist Gareth Owen, will also perform in intimate in-studio shows in February, May, and June. I’ll perform in two of these as a dancer. Alma de España runs classes September to June at all levels in flamenco dance, guitar, and cante. For tickets or inquiries:  1.250.384.8832  /  info@almadeespana.com.

Garth Martens won The Bronwen Wallace Award in 2011, a national prize for the best writer under thirty-five who has not yet published a book. His first book will appear with House of Anansi in April, 2014. You can hear him read his poem Dreamtime here: https://soundcloud.com/prism-mag/dreamtime-by-garth-martens.

New novels launched with suitable enthusiasm

Bill Gaston and Marjorie Celona

A Reading Hosted by Penguin Canada and Munro’s Books

Wednesday, October 17/12, Bard and Banker

Attended by Garth Martens

Novelists Marjorie Celona and Bill Gaston were in high cheer at the launch for their respective books, Celona’s debut novel Y and Gaston’s latest achievement The World. Relegated to the heat-lamped Hobbit hole upstairs, one hundred bodies crammed intimately together on benches, wicker chairs and between shelves of books, with pints in steady supply and higher demand. If a packed house is a recipe for an anxious sweat, the claustrophobic constraint of the venue added an uncommon ebullience to the usual wafty social cocktail that precedes such events, with every effervescent embrace an affirmation of tribal reliance.

The readings were brilliant as expected, beginning first with Celona, an emerging astonishment who flew in from Banff that morning, followed by local treasure Bill “The White Bear” Gaston, typically self-effacing in unshaven assemblé. Whether from the unrelenting heat lamp or the friction of flawlessly tempered prose, even the bodies lollygagging on the patio were unbuttoning their varied cardigans, dismantling their paisley silks, each set of thick-rimmed glasses sliding from the bridge of the nose, the product-rifled coifs losing their curated weave. Verily, the autocracies of style disunited in sweat.

Following the readings, of course the rabble queued, blank pages folded open, eager for a bit of chat or the commodified stamp of an author autograph, no one saying what everyone was thinking: if you back the right horse you can supplement your retirement fund on Ebay, or at least pay the rent this winter. The hooch was bankrolled by Penguin Canada, so I ordered another pint, its sedimental froth
churning like butter on the tongue. A good piss up, as my uncle might say. And two books that deserve it.

As the night staggered to an end, Gaston offered me a plate of fries, half-eaten. “Don’t take it if it’s gross,” he said, pointing to his mouth. “You can have half of the burger too, if you want it.” I took the fries. As Bill shambled to the bathroom, I picked at the plate with a gamesome friend, wondering when Bill’s partner Dede Crane might turn, mid-conversation, to find an alien person eating from her
husband’s plate. When we exceeded the budget for the liquor, the assemblage began to rotate and disperse. The moon looked like getting out of there. I kicked it to the street with a pair of books, a full belly, and a great night put to rest.

Garth Martens has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Victoria. He is a former member of the poetry editorial board at The Malahat Review. His first book of poems, Motive of Machines, will appear in spring of 2014 with House of Anansi Press.