Dancers wanted to perform 11,000 kilometers from Spain

At a point on the Japanese tourist map is Shima, a coastal city that houses a theme park dedicated exclusively to Spain. Visited by a million people a year, its most popular show is a flamenco choreography, which is performed night after night, up to three times a day in high season. Now he needs to complete his staff for next year’s show, which will be called Opera Prima.

The dancers will be recruited in Spain, in auditions to which the director and choreographer of the show, Daniel Doña, comes. “They need to have a high technical quality in their execution and be prepared, in mind and body, to face this effort with the energy and virtuosity that the Japanese public expects from Spanish artists,” says Doña, who was one of their dancers for 18 years. months, and who considers himself a “restless, curious choreographer, who seeks to create from his own impulses, from instinct and from freedom.”

Without stopping, Doña arrived in Japan in the nineties from the tablaos of her native Granada, where she began dancing at the age of 14. A few months ago she returned, almost three decades later, as director of an artistic work that has “a constant pulse between the traditional patterns of the deepest and most racial flamenco with the contemporary currents that cross current flamenco,” she says.

His time in the nation of the rising sun was not brief. “I return to the same place that caused the most changes in me, as a person and also as an artist,” although, says Doña, who after her time at Parque España entered the company of Yoko Komatsubara, one of the “greatest precursors of Japanese flamenco.” ».

Contract, house, adventure

Anyone who wants to challenge the “many absurd prejudices about the artists or shows offered in a theme park,” laments Doña, and wants to try their luck 11,000 kilometers from Spain, must be between 18 and 40 years old and register (at email: [email protected]) for the tests that will be in Barcelona and Madrid, in September.

“What interests me most is his artistic personality, that within the group of applicants he stands out for something that makes him unique, different,” says Doña, but she also warns: “any temporary uprooting from your family environment, friends, is hard. The cultural contrast at first impacts a lot, it is a completely unknown language and an antagonistic culture.

The contract runs from January to December 2025 and includes “a house for each of them, with electricity and water paid for,” encourages Doña, after her initial warnings. «It is in a rural enclave, but a few hours by train from big cities like Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya or Tokyo. There are those who rent or buy cars to travel around the country on their days off. “It is an incredible intercultural experience.” Over there, flamenco sounds in Japanese.