A Japanese dancer has been booed after becoming 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.
The 38-year-old from Kawasaki, whose stage name is La Yunko, said 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,” Ms 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.”
In the festival final, Ms Hagiwara danced in a long coral red dress to flamenco rhythms known as cantinas. But not everyone at the event thought her performance merited victory.
One of her rivals in the competition, María Canea, said the decision was due to “politics”. Among those who jeered the result, some suggested the move to give the award to a foreign dancer was “a fix” in order to boost the festival’s international appeal.
Francisco Paredes, the festival jury’s chairman, dismissed the claim.
“People are saying ridiculous things, that the competition was rigged by the mayor, which is completely false,” he said.
Ms 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.
Ms 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.”
