Check out this video of a dance collaboration with Archipelago translator Amaia Gabantxo (Plants Don’t Drink Coffee). Here’s a description from the Vimeo site:

“Palo a Palo” is a collaboration between Amaia Gabantxo and Andrea Peterson. It combines words and movement, song and dance inspired in Butoh and Flamenco. Narrating stories from the Spanish Civil War and the two performers’ families’ experience of it, it’s an ongoing project that waves together a series of palos (flamenco beats) and vignettes that together form a full-length show. The different palos represent the wide array of human emotion and expression: from loneliness to despair to joy, each emotion has its own rhythm in flamenco. In “Palo a Palo”, this flamenco concept is taken as far as possible, in this instance aided by the medium of Butoh. At first, the two performers interact through seemingly disjointed performances of spoken poetry and Butoh inspired dance. Shifts occur through a recorded soundscape that, coupled with rhythmic clapping (palmas), resolve into a union of flamenco song and dance. Like a moebius strip, butoh and flamenco, word and song, reflect on and inspire each other, neither of the two aiming to be front nor reverse, but both, either, none.

Palo A Palo from Luz Canons on Vimeo.

Directed and Shot by Luz Canons

Amaia Gabantxo is a writer and literary translator, a flamenco singer and university professor of Basque language and literature. Following the dictate of a pilgrim soul, she has lived many lives in many countries, always singing her way through them.

Andrea Peterson has been performing in the U.S. and overseas for the last 7 years. She has been training with the Chicago Butoh community and under the guidance of artistic director Wendy Clinard of Clinard Dance Theatre in Pilsen
for the last 3 years.