In her superb first solo creation, British flamenco dancer Yinka Esi Graves deftly examines the art of disappearance. Born in London and resident in Seville, in her work Graves reflects on the flamenco tradition’s African roots. Trained in a variety of dance forms, she says that she was initially resistant to dance in part because of the stereotype that “all Black people can dance”. And yet, she admits, she discovered that the Black body “is how we’ve been able to keep hold of our history.” 

Working in conjunction with flamenco guitarist Raúl Cantizano, drummer and poet Reme Graves and the flamenco singer Rosa de Algeciras, The Disappearing Act is an exploration of the ways in which Black women individually articulate their resistance to negation. Disappearing as despairing becomes something desirable; ‘cancelling’ as a self-imposed state of survival.

In ecology, “crypsis” refers to the capacity of some animals to avoid being seen – think of the mossy leaf-tailed gecko or the leafy seadragon – either as a predatory tactic or to hide from a predator. Graves applies this to Black performers and protagonists who have conspicuously vanished or been vanished from the history of art, circus or theatre. This widens into an exhausting daily cycle, in which women of African descent in particular are still engaged.

Camouflage and mimicry creep into the intimate realm, erasing identity through a form of imposter syndrome. Graves works with removal, absence, and invisibility as materials with which one can, paradoxically, “write yourself (back) into being”. “The Disappearing Act aims to raise a conversation around the daily dance between disappearing to exist and the refusal to be erased,” says Graves. She looks to the 19th century and the roots of flamenco. In the south of Spain, between the 15th and 19th centuries up to 10% of the population was Black, and there was a constant flow of information between Africa and the Americas. The format of the piece is that of concert parties, where a group of performers give Fante (Ghanaian) adaptations of European-style variety acts. She introduces Olga Brown, the mulatto figure who appears in the Edgar Degas painting, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando or Jacinto Padilla, or ‘El Negro Meri’, a Black Spanish flamenco dancer that the Lumière brothers filmed dancing at the 1900 Paris World Fair, but who was incorrectly identified until 2017.