CRISTINA Hoyos Panadero was born in Sevilla on 13 June, 1946.
She is 80 today, and she is one of Spain’s national treasures.
More than Sara Baras, more than Joaquin Cortes, Cristina is the living embodiment of the spirit of flamenco.
With her own dance company, and as the star of Antonio Gades’ outfit, she has taken Spanish folk-art to the world.
It’s hard to think of anyone in Spain who is further from the Catalan sensibility, associated as she is with the most remote corner of the country, but Barcelona called on her to represent Catalunya to the planet for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Olympic Games.
As a child she was coached by the legendary ‘Enrique el Cojo’ (‘Henry the Cripple’) and in 1969, aged 23, she joined Antonio Gades to make a series of unrepeatable flamenco films.
Gades, Hoyos and director Carlos Saura had one aim in mind – to take some Spanish classics, and through them to give the rest of the world some idea of the depth and richness of flamenco culture.
In 1981 they released Blood Wedding, the Lorca classic.
If you think of flamenco as essentially tragic, you’re right: through dance, we follow a disastrous Andalucian marriage.
Yes, it’s the story of the eternal triangle – but the deep flamenco belief, that when the ‘hour of blood’ comes, humans are powerless – pervades the whole production.
This was followed almost immediately by Carmen.
Eminently watchable, this clever film plays with the ambiguity which runs all the way through this most ‘sevillano’ of tales.
A handsome young director has hired a modern dance studio, and hired a superb guitarist (the immortal Paco de Lucia). He wants to mount a ‘relevant’ stage version of the famous opera.
He is being pulled in two directions. His education and middle-class sensibility is French (Carmen, and the novel which inspired it, were written by Frenchmen).
However, he has hired Cristina Hoyos as his lead dancer. She is the pure sevillana, the authentic flamenco ‘pole’ that his production needs. A clash is inevitable.
Hoyos is marvellous. Aggressive, uncompromising, her character is difficult, but enormously sympathetic. If anyone doubted Cristina’s acting talent before this, Carmen puts the argument to bed.
With her troupe of gypsy dancing-girls, she becomes the heart of the story – and steals the show!
Three years later, Cristina starred in El Amor Brujo (‘The Bewitched Love’), as the sad young widow who, when the midnight hour comes, dances with her dead husband’s ghost.
The astonishingly fruitful partnership with Antonio Gades was by no means limited to celluloid.
Cristina not only toured the world with Gades, but also made a series of flamenco documentaries for Spanish TV.
She teaches, and never preaches.
There are many of us – and this even includes some andaluces – who don’t know that flamenco music (and therefore dance) is divided into categories.
Quietly, but beautifully, La Hoyos shows us the different ‘palos’ – solea, martinete, and so forth.
It hardly needs saying that she has garnered every award going. A list of her prizes and medals would in itself be book-length.
In the 1990s, Cristina (then 60 years old) was diagnosed with breast cancer. Typically, she won the battle, and is now disease-free.
A writer and a cancer specialist (Angel Lopez and Ana Lluch) worked with Cristina during her years of treatment, and the result is a feel-good book, ¡Animo P’alante!
The title (in sevillano dialect, of course) means ‘Spirits Up! Let’s Go!’
It’s an appropriate motto for her entire life.
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