La Reina del Metal also invents a fleeting and unique genre: the flamenco rehearsal for two surrounded
bodies. But it is not about rehearsal in its most usual meaning of a test prior to actually executing 
something, but rather trying with all the strength and capabilities of something that we do 
not know if it is going to be achieved.

It is also, rehearsal, in another sense: 
"operation by which the metal or metals contained in the ore are ascertained, and the proportion in 
which each one is with the weight of it". Thus, what Vanesa Aibar and Enric Monfort face every time 
they make this La Reina del Metal is challenging themselves and each other, measuring themselves 
against their own limits, facing failure, to see what they are made of separately, but also in that 
artistic alloy that they have been forging from 2019 to today. And it is there, and only there, in 
this essay that is invented anew every day and in which failure is a real possibility and not a 
rhetorical game, where the truth can emerge. And why would we go to the theater if there was no
possibility, however remote, of being traversed by some kind of truth? That truth is also a place,
ecstasy (not being there of oneself) which, says Pascal Quignard, is the place that takes place in 
art. That flight from oneself is a search, but from what? They can call it nirvana, satori, 
enlightenment, fana,... here the word is not important but the desire that points to something beyond 
the word -a before or after it- and, therefore, an ailment.

Vanesa Aibar and Enric Monfort are inspired by the rites of passage to trace this attempt at 
transformation; but they do not do so by copying its formal appearance but rather its purpose: 
freeing us from physical limits to catch a glimpse, even briefly, of the landscape of eternity. 
To do this, as we said, they flee from appearance, to question themselves about the essence and 
inquire into what the scene has as a liminal place, in its capacity to transform those who inhabit
 it and invent their own ritual of passage. It is not about staging and blessing the transition 
from youth to adulthood or from being single to being married. No. Here, as in alchemy, the place 
of destination is the absolute, to obtain the gold, that is, the truth that crosses the scene and 
those of us who contemplate it. But, as Simone Weill warned, “loving the truth means enduring the 
void and, consequently, accepting death. Man only escapes the laws of this world by the space of a 
lightning bolt. Moments of pause, of contemplation, of pure intuition. He who for a moment endures 
the void, either obtains the supernatural bread, or falls. The risk is terrible and you have to run 
it, and even expose yourself to a moment without hope. But you shouldn't throw yourself into it."

And it is in that sense of order, of a game of life or death, in which we are interested in talking 
about the show as flamenco. Yes, La Reina del Metal is flamenco in that sense more than in the way 
that the choreographic languages, the rhythms and certain harmonies identify elements of that genre, 
even though they are there: from the sublime taranta that Enric reinvents on the vibraphone to the 
paseíllos that Vanesa draws or her shocking gestures por seguiriyas. Because what interests both of 
them about that thing they call flamenco is not its obstinate reworking of the idea of the sublime 
through the Lorca duende (discovery and cliché), continued and augmented by the mythology with which
flamenco itself tries to explain itself. , legitimize and, therefore, sell. No. That invented tale 
of flamenco made of melancholy and hyperbole is just an interface in which many get trapped. What is 
interesting is behind it: the aspiration to go beyond the artistic fact itself to become a pure event:
rite before the rite, original and originary act, waste and epiphany, immanence and transcendence. 
Nor is there an absorption in technique, metrics and the corpus defined as jondo.