JGM: Like you, most people know nothing about Spanish dance. As Aida Gomez says, it's a vanishing artform. Why should people be interested in Spanish dance?

DC: Even the Spanish people don't know anything about it. The Spanish dance that Antonia Merce (La Argentina) came up with in 1923 is a very interesting art world, because it comes from the folklore of Spanish dances, but it's actually been developed and evolved through Spanish classical music, from composers like Manuel de Falla, Enrique Granados, Joaquin Torino. They placed their knowledge and experiences and inspirations into the popular culture of the Spanish people. They are short, very interesting and varied, and they use a lot of different styles. Spanish dance combines flamenco, folklore, and bolero school, and that is the most interesting part: variety.

JGM: Mariemma's major contribution was regulating Spanish dance. Why was that necessary

DC: In 1965, the Spanish Dance Society founded in South Africa by Marina Keet (de Grut), among others, actually set up regulations already. When Mariemma did that in 1969, it was necessary for Spanish dance to become academic, because, as you well know from America, things that have an academic base are always more important. In 1933, Manuela Sana proposed this to Antonia Merce and Vicente Escudero, but that actually came to nothing because of the civil war starting in 1936. For Mariemma to have done so after all these years, with the dictatorship, and the repression, and you know, sponsoring Spanish dance in a very propagandistic-like agenda by Franco, maybe that was the best way of doing it, better than actually repressing it. At the same time Mariemma struggled her whole life to get to that, so I think it's very important in many different viewpoints; geographical, folkloric, cultural, political, social. Despite not having made a huge impact on Spanish culture, it's certainly made a huge impact on world dance.

JGM: Enrique Luzuriaga created works for her, but he is barely mentioned in the documentary; in fact, it's difficult to find information on him anywhere. Why does he get so little recognition when in fact their work was almost like duets?

DC: I suppose I'm to blame. Having said that, I felt that the main figure was Mariemma as a dancer. I tried to portray him as very important but the complement to what she was doing.

JGM: Aida Gomez refers to people "fleeing" to flamenco, yet flamenco is an important component of Spanish dance; one of your most fascinating clips is Mariemma dancing with a cantaor.

DC: Flamenco is a very important style, but so is the bolero school of folklore. People like flamenco, people dance flamenco, people walk flamenco, breathe flamenco, but at the same time there are three other legs [of Spanish dance]. It has four limbs, but at the moment we just use one arm or one leg. There is actually one more leg and two more arms that are not being used. In the '40s, '50s, '60s, the masters of the time used to have a combination of the four styles. Now we are very much driven by flamenco because it's the easiest, in a way, to kind of practice, to improvise, with that easiness of saying, Hey, we do flamenco, we can improvise and do some duende stuff, and you don't have to know that much technique and yet you can get away with that. That's what I think she's complaining about. They went through a huge amount of training before acquiring skill that they were able to use properly and profoundly.

JGM: I think that Israel Galvan and El Farruco would disagree with you about technique. [Note: JGM was referring to Antonio Montoya Flores, while Daniel Cabrero is referring to Antonio Fernandez Montoya, Flores's grandson.]

DC: Well, Israel Galvan is actually a dancer. He's been trained as a dancer. His training was very technical. Then he found his own niche. Which I think is actually very important, very interesting as well. It's exciting to have someone like him to be able to do what he is doing performing that improvisational way of dancing but at the same time with technique and background. As far as El Farruco, there are comments all over Spain and people disagree with his way of dancing, but then there's the way he converses with the audience. I suppose it's somehow more to do with how they promote themselves and play that circus of artistic skill and craft. So on the one hand Israel is technically very proficient but goes another way, while Farruco is doing his own stuff and it's working for him and he gets a lot of audiences. I suppose it's a combination of both, the money and the political side of how he portrays himself and not flamenco as a whole.

JGM: You do know that I'm doing this interview for a flamenco website?

DC: Maybe it's better for me to say flamenco is the best thing ever. But I think that flamenco people need to be reminded that there are other styles. They can actually combine it's not a matter of you dancing flamenco and the other styles, but maybe you can dance flamenco and have other people in your company trying to find that way of promoting these styles, because sooner or later, things go in and out of fashion. If flamenco goes out of fashion, the way things are going. Flamenco belongs now to the UNESCO global theme [Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity], yet the other day I was reading in a blog that for the time being the Andalusian government is not fulfilling the requirements that UNESCO is asking for; at the turn of 2013, if they haven't fulfilled that, flamenco might be taken off the list. It's these kind of paradoxes that inspired the Spanish culture. We have something, and because we don't have an enterprising vision, we just lie on what we have and neglect its development. I would like to see what those people are doing in a couple of years' time, see whether flamenco has more impact, the same impact, or people are going to start getting bored and go from time to time to a flamenco show instead of actually making it bigger and bigger.

JGM: In my opinion, flamenco dance is changing into something completely non-flamenco with the recent works of Belen Maya, Maria Pages, Sara Baras, Rocio Molina. Did Mariemma spend much time in the flamenco world? She "discovered" Antonio Canales, Joaquin Cortes, Enrique Morente.

DC: You see what I'm talking about. Flamenco is becoming something of a circus with all of this celebrity-like bullshit, and all that easiness that we Spanish people like and attempt to use in our picaresque. This was something that Cervantes talked about in the seventeenth century. Mariemma was Cortes's first teacher, and she offered Enrique Morente the chance to go to New York, but she didn't spend a lot of time in flamenco because in those years flamenco was something that went hand-in-hand with the other styles. She was more stylized, but she was very keen to dance flamenco as well as she could and put her skill, her uniqueness, into the flamenco world. For me if a flamenco performance is longer than twenty minutes, it becomes very boring. It doesn't keep you alive all the time. The masters combined it with the bolero school. Give me a touch of gentleness and give me the hardness of footwork, but don't give me footwork all the time. Because that's going to be like in the movies; if you give me only high, high, high, my brain cannot bear such a huge amount of strongness or lightness. So just having that bar is a thing that we unfortunately do not understand in Spain; it's always extreme, we are an extreme country, in everything, We are left or right, we are black or white, we are dictatorship or freedom, we have no other term, we have no gray scale, we just have those two main colors, observing colors or reflecting colors, but we don't lift them up as much as we could.

JGM: How did making the film change your view of Spanish history?

DC: It allowed me to see that the arts is something quite neglected in general by Spanish people. We've got this financial credit crisis, yet the cultural side of things in Spain, which is very strong and very exportable to other countries, is not something we see as a business like you Americans do, the English do, the French do. It's allowing me to see those opportunities, as well as to explore and export and enjoy my culture but also to learn about who I am as a Spaniard.

JGM: In your artist's statement you referred to a collective amnesia regarding your country's recent past. How do you account for that collective amnesia?

DC: It's funny how the Spanish people take everything that comes from America, yet we're not able to bear with our own roots, with our own culture, with our own life. It's a shameful thing. In Barcelona, why do supermarkets look like American ones when they should actually have their own personality? American things come over and over and people are embracing them with no realization. It's not a matter of not embracing, it's a matter of looking after what you have, building your own roots more than embracing someone else's stuff.

JGM: You also say that one of the secondary goals of your documentary was showing the personal growth of a woman almost obsessively dedicated to achieving her dream.

DC: That's the main story for me, the universal truth. Almost everyone can relate to what Mariemma went through. At screenings people told me, Yeah, that's happened to me as well, or Yeah, I felt very close to what she was suffering. That was for me the most interesting part, seeing how this child wanted to dance and she ended up as a dancer and died almost dancing, at 91 years of age. You see the last performance of her on the stage in 1992 and you say, God, it was 1926 when she was discovered and it's now 1992 and she's still dancing. Oh, my God, this is a passion, this is fulfillment, overcoming all those obstacles. To me that was amazing. Seeing that life gave me some perspective on what my life could hopefully be in the years to come. It was cool, very cool.

MS: It's a church on the Upper West Side, and I'm trying to get it for four years. It's going to be a studio and an office space. That's what I'm trying to do. I really want to have a place, to give classes, to rehearse. To have an office.

JGM: That's going to transform flamenco in New York.