Manuel Liñán: The first memory I have, about flamenco is the image of a woman dancing with a red skirt. And I remember the circumference the skirt was creating in the air. That was the first time when I said, “Woah, what is this?”

I told my mum that I also wanted to dance. And in the school I was in, there were flamenco after-school classes, so I signed up. And suddenly, one day, while dancing… I realised… the power flamenco had on my body.

My father is a bullfighter. And when I was born, being the only boy at home, I had two older sisters, he wanted me to be a bullfighter, since I was very little. I didn’t even know what bulls were. But when my career was focusing more on flamenco dancing, he also said, “The dancer is like the bullfighter. So you have to stand like this, like the bullfighter, and you have to behave like a bullfighter, too.” So yes, I was really influenced by my father in that regard.

When I started dancing, I realised that, because I’m a man, I have to dance in a determined way. And I’m comfortable with what they’re teaching, but I also want to dance like the women, the way my partners danced. But when I do, well… people laughed at me. They forbid it, they say, “No, because you’re a man, and you can’t dance like that. You have to dance like this.” But in my case, I wanted to dance like a woman, so I did it secretly. In my room, secretly, with nobody seeing me. That kid with the skirt, the flowers, wanting to dance like all the inspiring female dancers I saw. It’s my childhood.

Well, the tablao for me… is a very important aspect in my career. I, in fact, trained in a tablao. I would say it’s some kind of bar… some kind of bar where there’s a stage, sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger, and where people can see a flamenco show.

And the tablao has something special that the theatre doesn’t, it’s the improvisation. In a tablao, everything is improvised. There’s no rehearsal, you don’t know what’s going to happen,

Well, Muerta de Amor is the latest proposal we’ve performed, it speaks about the importance relationships have in people, the way we connect… So I met with Ernesto Artillo, who has accompanied me in the process. So he looked a bit into my past and we found out there were a series of men, relationships that had influenced my dance throughout my life.

What had really altered my dancing were these relationships, maybe because I’m homosexual, having to always hide, maybe that has caused my relationships to get bigger, making them very dramatic, in the heat of the moment. And that’s why it’s called Muerta de Amor, because ‘dead by love’ is an expression we use here in Spain when you like something so much, when something is extremely exaggerated, we say, “I’m dead.”

I think that flamenco and dancing are really wide concepts, and I think everyone will take something different with them. What I would like, for example, is that young men that… that want to dance with a tailed dress, or want to dance with different aesthetics, they shouldn’t be afraid to do so. They shouldn’t have social judgment. They should do it fearlessly. And if my dance has served to take that fear away, I would be very happy.