Mario Maya
Acting
Biography
Mario Maya was one of Spain's most innovative and influential flamenco dancers.
Born: October 23, 1937
Place of Birth: Córdoba, Spain
Known For
Flamenco
The film presents thirteen rhythms of flamenco, each with song, guitar, and dance: the up-tempo bularías, a brooding farruca, an anguished martinete, and a satiric fandango de huelva. There are tangos, a taranta, alegrías, siguiriyas, soleás, a guajira of patrician women, a petenera about a sentence to death, villancicos, and a final rumba.
Canta Gitano
A short dance performance.
Corre, gitano
A teenager of gypsy race is accused of a crime he has not committed. For that reason, he decides to flee without truce until he reaches the coast. During his journey, he does not stop dancing.
Camelamos naquerar
Camelamos naquerar (We Want to Speak) is an adaptation of the theatre play of the same name which was born out of a collaboration between Romani poet and university professor José Heredia Maya and Romani flamenco dancer and choreographer Mario Maya; the latter also performs in the piece, along with other artists. The title in Caló, the language used by Gitanos, translates as ‘we want to speak’, a revolutionary message that illustrates the efforts to reclaim a place in Spanish history for the Roma people and denounce the institutional injustice suffered by the community. It takes as its starting point the Pragmatic decrees signed by the Catholic Monarchs at the end of the fifteenth century, which heralded the long persecution of the Roma people, and continues right up to the twentieth-century Francoist laws.