Weekly Watch: Flamenco

I recently worked the bar for a flamenco event, and I got to see the dancers who take their lessons at the studio show off what they've learned. Though the senior instructors are all from Madrid, the students are from all over the world -- one of them got a free drink, in fact, because she's about to move back home to Japan. ExpertVillage has annoyingly disabled embedding, but they do have a playlist of basic flamenco lessons you can check out if you'd like to try it yourself.

One of the star students taught me a bit about it, and I'd have to say the strangest part is learning the 12-count claps. The spacing between the accents has absolutely no internal consistency, which means the pattern has to be learned as all twelve counts in their entirety. It's a longer string than humans can typically cram into memory all in one go -- seven is the typical ceiling, which is why we break phone numbers up into strings of three or four -- so it's awkward at first.

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