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The palms indicate that this is a Mediterranean  region.

The Middle Eastern side.

The flamenco side.

Mhijea in costume #1.

Carmen Almador joins.

Costume #2.

A-whirling.

Nice blue steeple

Architectural metaphor: light from heaven.

Sherry was next on the agenda. My father once drank Dry Sack, and as I child I was impressed with the trademark burlap bag that packed the medium dry sherry. We visited the bodega that produces that product and many more sherries: [Alexander] Williams & [Arthur] Humbert, founded in 1877 by Englishmen. The company is now owned by a Spanish company. The huge wine-aging warehouse, with its thick aromatic atmosphere of wood and sherry; the front pond for resident ducks, geese, and swans; the horse stables [horses are for entertainment; they prance within the cool warehouse]; the large, attractive tasting room; and the tempting company shop were impressive and surprising, but there was something even more astonishing, whose images you must see below. I was partial to the drier sherries but I took home a bottle of Crema de Alba, a better than Bailey-like liqueur, which is hardly dry ...  but delicious.
 

Before visiting a  famous flamenco club, the group was given lessons in flamenco hand gestures, elementary dance moves, and clapping—palmas. Simple lessons. Only a few talented dancers managed to get into the swing of things, others, like me, klutzed, but we all gained an appreciation, albeit seriously limited, of the complex and difficult art of flamenco dance. Our eyes were now trained for when we watch the professionals. Our teachers were José Caraoscura and Mhijea.
 

What ensued for me, and to a large extent others in the group, was magic. We would witness and, at least for me, experience the deep spirit of flamenco, duende, conveyed by the dancers, the finest I have encountered in my musical life. This was beyond the well-polished high quality seen in concerts of touring artists, even those who have earned awards.  These were long, even timeless, dances. The male dancer, José de los Reyes, was sheer energy and boldness: he reminded me of an electronic capacitor charging as he stood listening to the music in deep concentration and then rapidly discharging in a flurry of eye-popping improvisational, highly inventive steps; a final contorted shake-off was as if he was removing residual electrostatic charge to reset for the next dance.  [I told you that I was a scientist!] We watched mesmerized. For me, however, it was the younger woman dancer in red, Jemma Parrilla, whose grace, power, intensity, flow, improvisations, and embodiment of the music penetrated my marrow. I empathically felt her duende. I was absorbed such that ego dissolved, if but a moment. The body reacted to this aesthetic bliss with a flood of tears. [The body-mind knows! Such an alternative state is not a high level of transcendence—entirely different categories of being; it was, however, the conveyed integral perception of  unobstructed Tao, the way water flows down a hillside.] This evening in Jerez was the highlight among many joyous and constructive interactions and events of my Andalusian adventure, such as the forthcoming musical jam in a cave and having dinner at a gypsy home with spontaneous music and dance, a juerga, echoing the movie Lotcho Drom. It still leaves me breathless.
 

Into the heart.

This says it all.

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