Writer and Director: Paloma Zapata
Paloma Zapata’s docufiction La Singla is lovingly researched tribute to one of Spain’s most extraordinary flamenco dancers, Antoñita Singla. And her life story is extraordinary too. Born in 1948 in a Romani shanty town near Barcelona, she was found to be deaf and didn’t learn to speak till she was in her teens. Somehow attuned to her mother’s clapping hands, the child began to dance, practising obsessively and developing a dazzlingly wild, passionate style. Yet, as Zapata explores, La Singla, as she became known, was fuelled by overwhelming feelings of loneliness and anger, feelings that she could only express in dance.
For a short period from her late teens, La Singla was discovered by German jazz musicians, goes on tour and becames internationally famous. What fires Zapata is the fact that sometime later La Singla simply disappears. Nothing is heard of her for some fifty years. It’s not known if she’s still alive.
The opening of her film is impressive – the rhythmic sounds of a train clattering over wooden sleepers turns into the powerfully percussive sounds of flamenco. We get a glimpse of La Singla herself at about 16, performing her mesmerising dancing. In voice over, we hear a young woman talking about her fascination with La Singla after finding old footage of her on the internet. The dancer, she says, appeared both mysterious and deeply sad, dancing “as if she were undergoing an exorcism.”
We watch the young woman having a flamenco lesson with an inspirational teacher who is herself deaf, and who incorporates sign language into her dance. In these early scenes it’s easy to assume that the young woman is Zapata herself. But she is in fact a fictional character, Elena, and it is her fictional journey to discover the truth about La Singla which the film follows. It’s presumably a practical decision. The film is a modest one: Zapata not only writes and directs it, but acts as editor too.
At times, however, this docufictional approach leads to artificiality and longueurs. Several times Elena is used to deliver what is clearly exposition, articulating to a family member or a friend what she’s discovered. Particularly egregious is the clunky scene where she happens upon an elderly local in Barcelona who just happens to suggest she try a car dealership because it’s called Singla – and sure enough the owner is La Singla’s brother.
In reality, the archive material tells the story vividly without the need for this device. Apart from wonderful, though rare footage of La Singla dancing, there are newspaper reports of her success on the world stage in the 1960s. Also fascinating are extracts from the 1963 film Los Tarantos in which La Singla performed.
Above all, there is the memorable photography of Barcelona photographer Colita (the pseudonym of Isabel Steva Hernández), who captured powerful images of Romani life in the era in which La Singla was growing up and later photographed the dancer herself.
Elena is shown responding to all this material and repeatedly speculating on what went wrong in La Singla’s life. At 95 minutes the film feels over-extended; there are too many shots which feel like padding, too many plodding scenes of Helena Kaittani as Elena walking around looking intense. Some at least of the truth about La Singla is finally discovered, but it somehow feels disappointing. But the film is worthwhile as it preserves the memories of Spain’s greatest flamenco dancer.
La Singla is screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2023.
