Flamenco Dancer Demonstrates How Music and Dance Can be a Grammy Award Winner
February 14, 2020
World-renowned and award-winning flamenco dancer Nino de los Reyes made history when Chick Corea’s “Antidote” won the 2020 Grammy Award for “Best Latin Jazz Album.” De los Reyes’ footwork contribution as a band member to Chick Corea’s “The Spanish Heart Band,” demonstrated how music and dance can be a compelling masterpiece.
In contributing as a dancer to an award-winning music album, Nino de los Reyes considers it an enormous honor to be the first ever dancer to be part of a Grammy award recognition. He voiced his thoughts about his participation in the “Antidote” album; that it made him proud to be a dancer who gets seen and heard when creating music with his body.
He added that In major events like the Grammy Music Awards, dancers are only secondary to the music.
”I also consider myself a musician, a percussionist from my soul,””It gives me enormous honor to be the first dancer to receive recognition for music” … “it gave me a gift that I will never forget; of demonstrating how music and dance are one.”
Nino’s Process of Creating Music Through Dance
According to Nino, flamenco dancers create sounds, even in silence. As a flamenco dancer, Nino said he gets close to musicians on stage and shares with them. Doing so allows him to absorb as much as he could, to blend with his own rhythm that is mostly percussive. That way, his body can express his internal music when he dances.
Even though Nino had performed and recorded several times before, with Paul Simon (2016 – “Stranger to Stranger” album) and in Chick Corea’s 75th birthday celebration at the Blue Note in NY and in Madison Square Garden , he said the Grammy experience was new because the environment was totally different. To help him own the experience, he kept Chick Corea’s advice in mind while performing:
“Take advantage of the environment you are in so you won’t become a prisoner of that environment.”