He wears mustache, earrings and necklaces, cultivates on stage the graceful undulation, the postures of diva. Singer Rodrigo Cuevas can also appear in a dress, skirt, or lace, pose in garters next to his donkey or even naked, his body coated in black grease, with horns on his head. On the cover of his new and second album, Courtship Manual (“handbook for courtship”), a singular and contemporary reinterpretation of the folklore of Asturias, his native region, in the north of Spain, he shows himself in profile, on a red background. He is coming to present this album at the Café de la danse in Paris on March 2.
Rodrigo Cuevas also says he was inspired for his photo adorning the cover of a carnival tradition (Los Diablos de Luzon) of a city in the province of Guadalajara. As for the name he found for it, the idea came to him when he noticed that the ten popular songs he covered on the fifteen titles on his new album, might constitute a kind of manual for courting. ” The songs were made especially to please or flirt in the rounds, at the ball. There was always a touch of seduction. »
I like to sneak into this tradition and so that there is continuity, the air of nothing “
An excellent singer, dancer, musician, performer cultivating ambiguity with relish, Rodrigo Cuevas wields irony and provocation. He’s having fun : “I give the public what they expect. » Beyond the eccentric character, he is above all and above all a transmitter of knowledge, dances (xiringuelu, muñeira) and popular song from Asturias, where he was born, in Oviedo, in 1985, or from neighboring Galicia. (he lived there for a few years, following passing through Barcelona). It’s a precious heritage collected from the elders that he rereads in his own way, injecting it with electronic sounds, with the complicity of the Catalan producer and musician Raül Refree.
pass on stories
Cuevas opens the album with a title spoken in Asturian, Namas s’acaba what never counted (“only things end that are no longer told”), words that clearly express his desire to transmit stories, a popular memory, what his grandmother and the elders in the villages taught him, including that of where he lives today, Vegarrionda, a hamlet in Asturias. Thirteen inhabitants, not counting the animals. He enumerates those who populate his household and his garden: Two donkeys, a dog, five cats, five hens and a female duck. »
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