From café cantante to tablao

Before the stage

Wikipedia traces the earliest written mentions of flamenco music to the late 18th century. The word flamenco first appears as the name of a musical genre in a newspaper article of 1847, where it was called a gitano genre. Seville's tourist board says that until the middle of the 19th century flamenco had hardly left family gatherings and private parties. Its public stage came later. The city's tourist board adds that flamenco is surely the purest expression of Andalusian folklore, and that its origins are linked to the arrival of the gitanos in the 15th century in the countryside of Cádiz, Jerez and Seville.

The first singing cafés

In the middle of the 19th century flamenco became popular through the cafés cantantes. Wikipedia names Silverio Franconetti as the man who opened the first flamenco singers' café in Seville in 1881, while the city's tourist board places the first of these cafés around 1885. The sources differ by a few years, but both put it in the 1880s. The cafés spread through Andalusia and on to Madrid and made flamenco a paid profession.

A crucible for professionals

Wikipedia says that in Franconetti's café the cantaores worked in a competitive environment, which helped professional singers emerge and let the art take shape. Locals learned the cantes and reinterpreted Andalusian folk songs in their own style, widening the repertoire. The public's taste, in turn, helped fix the form. The article says that cafés cantantes were the centre of professional flamenco from the mid-19th century into the 1920s.

Flamenco opera and the theatre

Between 1920 and 1955, according to Wikipedia, flamenco shows were staged in bullrings and theatres under the name flamenco opera. Larger stages changed how the art was presented, with bigger casts and more spectacle. A century on, flamenco has both large theatre productions and small rooms where a handful of artists perform a few steps from the audience. Seeing flamenco in a small room gives you the reverse of the big stage.

The tablao

Seville's tourist board calls the city's flamenco tablaos the direct heirs of the old singing cafés. It adds that you can also hear flamenco in neighbourhood peñas, in themed spaces, in certain bars and at festivals such as the Bienal, held every two years in even years. A tablao is, in short, a venue built around a raised stage and a close audience, a format that goes back to the cafés cantantes.

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Where Casa de la Memoria fits

The operator says the shape of its theatre, wide and semicircular, recalls the old cafés cantantes, and that its artists perform without microphones in a room with no bar or restaurant service. That sets it apart from a tablao where drinks arrive during the show. Both formats are part of the same tradition, and the right one depends on the kind of evening you want.

Recognition today

In 2010 UNESCO inscribed flamenco on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. UNESCO notes that flamenco is transmitted through dynasties, families, social groups and flamenco clubs. For a visitor, that history is audible in the room: the show you hear in Seville is the same living tradition that began in family gatherings. Cante, baile and toque are still passed on in the same way, and the artists on a small stage are part of that chain, whatever the size of the room.