As the world becomes more connected and dynamic, everyone should expect that cultures will tend to mix and produce a new generation of experts, specialists and artists. Despite all the lingering distraction, change remain constant and evolution continues.
The air of change has whiff across Europe as a Japanese dancer became the first foreigner to win at Spain’s most prestigious flamenco festival.
When the Cante de las Minas festival jury chose Junko Hagiwara as best female dancer, applause was mixed with jeers in the town of La Unión in Murcia. According to the 38-year-old from Kawasaki, whose stage name is La Yunko, she did not hear the hecklers because her mind "went blank" after the announcement.
No foreign competitor had previously won the "Desplante" award at the annual festival held every August.
"When I dance, I don’t think I am a foreigner, that I am Japanese. It doesn’t occur to me. I am simply on stage, I listen to the guitar, the singing, and what I feel I express in my dancing," Hagiwara told local newspaper La Opinión de Murcia.
"I consider myself to be a purist of the genre. True flamenco purists don’t think about where I come from."
Hagiwara fell in love with flamenco guitar aged 14 when when hearing it as supporting music for a Spanish rhythmic gymnast she was watching on television.
Her parents did not encourage her to pursue her passion but, once she was an 18-year-old at university in Tokyo, she started to take flamenco lessons.
She eventually moved to Seville where she trained with top flamenco exponents and married an Andalusian.
Hagiwara said she was "overwhelmed by the responsibility" of winning the prize and "infinitely grateful" to fellow performers, who have sent her messages of support.
A flamenco critic Manuel Bohórquez wrote in Sevilla Info, an online newspaper: "I liked her more than her competitors for three reasons: her classicism, that she did not dance for the gallery, in other words, for the public, and, finally, her good training."
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