Flamenco dancing took over the iconic Grand Central Station in New York today for a few moments, where several dozen bailaoras led by Siudy Garrido performed a “flash mob” before the astonished gaze of travelers who came to catch a train on Friday afternoon.
Garrido, a Venezuelan with two decades in flamenco and now based in Miami, a city where she has an academy and a flamenco company, gathered her followers and friends -mostly flamenco dance students from the Big Apple- in the lobby of the station, one of the most photographed places in New York.
Accompanied by guitarist José Luis de la Paz, a cantaor and a small megaphone, Garrido and the other bailaoras took out a shawl from their luggage and began to dance as a group for alegrías, with groups of tourists making a circle around them.
The “performance” lasted barely ten minutes, without time for the police to put an end to the little uproar made by the bailaoras.
Garrido is scheduled for a single performance tomorrow at a theater in New York where all tickets are already sold, for a show that she had pending since the coronavirus pandemic broke out.
The bailaora explains that her academy and her “troupe” have survived isolation, the mask, and distance classes, and now they celebrate “the return to the stage and to life”.
She assures that many of those attending tomorrow’s show are fans who did not want their tickets returned in 2020 and hoped that she would one day dance again, which has taken almost two years to do.