"La Forastera" (The Outsider)

This September 8-11, a daring new multidisciplinary flamenco dance production by award-winning flamenco choreographer and dancer Lia Grainger takes the stage at The Factory Theatre in downtown Toronto. Through narration, documentary footage and interviews shot across Canada and Spain, projections, soundscapes, and live music and dance, “La Forastera” (The Outsider) tells a love story, about the love between a woman and an art form that is not hers.

La Forastera follows a young Canadian artist who falls in love with flamenco, and who pursues her obsession to a foreign country in the hopes of assimilating and perfecting a foreign craft. It is about learning an art versus being born into it, about the things that cannot be taught but can only be gathered through lived experience, and the realization that every story has value.

La Forastera is a true story. Artistic director, choreographer and dancer Lia Grainger traded a stable home, job and relationship in Canada for a rooftop garret in Seville’s old town and the freedom to spent long, hot days in the studio and longer, hotter nights on the city’s storied streets and in its flamenco cafes and clubs. On the cobbled streets of the cradle of flamenco, she danced, as a jubilant, heart-wrenching musical art form came to life all around her. And she took Canadian film-maker David Grimes with her, to document the way of life there, and the culture that surrounds flamenco in Seville. The city is filled with artists like Lia, who have given up their lives – be it in Japan, Russia, Turkey, Mexico – to assimilate to the southern Spanish lifestyle that encapsulates the flamenco art form in Spain.

Lia will perform accompanied by Dora Mavor Moore award-winning guitarist Nicolas Hernandez, French flamenco singer Alejandro Mendía, and percussionist Matias Recharte.