Sephardic steps and the megillah: a flamenco Purimshpiel

The Purim holiday brings noisemakers, costumes, and the playful re-enactment of the Book of Esther into synagogues and community halls across the Jewish world. The Purimshpiel — a theatrical retelling that often leans into satire, parody, and song — reshapes itself according to whoever stages it. For one choreographer whose childhood kitchen smelled of preserved lemons and whose adolescent years were spent in dance studios in suburban Sydney, the holiday has become an annual flamenco project.

In Australia, where the Sephardic heritage of many North African Jews has long mixed with the country's vibrant Latin music scene, the idea of staging a Purimshpiel in flamenco style does not feel as foreign as it might elsewhere. Sydney's inner suburbs host a busy flamenco calendar, with guitar concerts in Newtown and intensive workshops in Marrickville, while Melbourne's Spanish-speaking artists gather in venues around St Kilda and Caulfield, where large Jewish communities have lived for generations. Against this backdrop, the choreographer's Purimshpiel has become a hybrid ritual that asks what happens when the biblical Esther takes the stage as a flamenco dancer.

A childhood between two worlds

The dancer grew up in a household where Ladino lullabies alternated with Australian children's television, where her grandmother rolled grape leaves in the kitchen while her mother drove her across Sydney to Saturday classes in everything from ballet to contemporary dance. By her early teens she had asked, almost as a joke, whether she could try flamenco. The question turned out to be formative.

Flamenco struck her as a dance built on listening — to the singer, to the cajón player, to the room itself. The same quality, she later realised, had shaped the way Sephardic Jews approached prayer for centuries: an attention to the human voice, to communal rhythm, to the long breath of a cantor carrying a piyyut across a room of worshippers. Her teacher in the inner west of Sydney was a Spanish dancer who had migrated via Adelaide and who insisted that the student learn the cante before the steps. That advice stayed with her.

Flamenco as a language of memory

By her twenties the dancer had moved from technique to interpretation. She began to read about the deep historical connection between Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and the Andalusian culture that would, centuries later, produce flamenco. Music scholars have noted the persistence of Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish elements across the Mediterranean performance traditions, and in Andalusia that cross-pollination shaped what became the cante jondo, the deep song.

She treats flamenco less as an exotic costume than as a language of memory. In her workshops at community centres across Sydney and during residencies at the Sydney Jewish Museum, she teaches that the footwork — the zapateado — has the same percussive function as the Purim grogger, the noisemaker used to drown out Haman's name. The castanet click and the palm strike, the palmas, work in her choreography as an acoustic echo of the synagogue's responsive reading. The result is a dance vocabulary that does not feel borrowed but inherited.

Reading the megillah through movement

Choreographing the Esther story requires hard choices. How does the audience hear Vashti? How is Mordechai portrayed? In her version, Esther enters to a soleá, a slow, weighted form that allows the dancer to inhabit the queen's interior conflict before any word is sung. Haman receives a more aggressive martinetes, with rhythmic hammer-strikes that mimic the sound of the wooden mallet used to fasten the gallows.

The company includes both professional and amateur dancers drawn from Sydney's Jewish and Latin American communities, an arrangement the choreographer describes as a deliberate echo of the mixed audiences she knew growing up. Costume fittings happen in community halls in Bondi and Marrickville, and rehearsals include synagogue members who have never danced at all.

Element	Traditional Ashkenazi Purimshpiel	Flamenco-infused version
Music	Klezmer, folk melodies, novelty songs	Spanish guitar, palmas, cajón
Dance	Circle dances, broad comedy, limited choreography	Zapateado, braceo, marcaje, structured footwork
Costume	Biblical robes, wigs, costume-shop jokes	Trajes de flamenca, shawls, ruffled mantillas
Story tone	Farce, parody, call-and-response	Dramatic, percussive, with mournful tonal shifts
Sacred cues	Grogger at Haman's name, hamantaschen	Same, plus Sephardic piyyutim and Ladino refrains
Audience participation	Booing, cheering, noisemakers	Palmas, "olé," communal stomp on cue

The table is a working document, the choreographer says, not a rulebook. Each Purim she revises it according to the dancers she has and the rooms she is given.

Rehearsing across cultures in Sydney

Sydney's Jewish community is concentrated in the eastern suburbs and the inner west, while its Spanish-speaking artists tend to cluster around Newtown, Surry Hills, and the harbour-side rehearsal spaces used by Sydney Dance Company and Australian Dance Theatre alumni. The Purimshpiel sits at the seam of those two geographies. Rehearsals rotate between a community hall in Bondi and a converted warehouse in Marrickville, and the dancers travel by tram, train, and the occasional long drive from the Central Coast.

Australian law shapes the logistics as well as the spirit of the project. The country has long treated vilification on the basis of religion as a civil offence, and the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 in New South Wales provides recourse for community members targeted by antisemitic harassment. The choreographer routinely consults with security at venues and briefs younger dancers on how to handle verbal abuse, an experience Jewish Australians have increasingly documented in national surveys of antisemitism.

Funding comes from a patchwork typical of Australian arts: a small grant from Create NSW, support from the Australia Council for the Arts, ticket sales, and in-kind donations from local businesses. The model is fragile, but the calendar is reliable. Purim falls in late February or March, and the show is mounted within a tight ten-day window after the fast of Esther.

Costumes, cajón, and castanets

Visually, the production leans on the rich palette of flamenco dress. Black lace for the mourning of the exile, deep red batas de cola trailing behind the queen, white cotton shirts for Mordechai and his kinsmen. Esther's transformation from orphaned cousin to Persian sovereign is marked by a single change of shawl, the mantón, which grows longer as her political power grows.

The percussion set-up is equally deliberate. A single flamenco cajón sits beside a small drum kit, and a pair of wooden palillos clack in the hands of an offstage player who doubles as the show's call-and-response leader. Musicians include both conservatoire-trained guitarists and self-taught players who learned from family in their kitchens. The blend, the choreographer says, is the point.

Audience, antisemitism, and belonging

For many audience members the Purimshpiel is the most Jewish performance they see all year, and the choreography offers them a different way into the story. Younger viewers, in particular, respond to the dancers more than to the chant of the megillah. The choreographer welcomes this. She has spoken at events hosted by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and at interfaith gatherings during Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas, arguing that flamenco gives the Esther narrative a body that purely spoken readings cannot.

There is also a political dimension. In a period when Jewish cultural events across Australia have faced protests outside venues and pressure on social media, the choreographer insists on keeping the show public, accessible, and joyful. Flamenco's history as an Andalusian art form shaped by Romani, Moorish, Jewish, and Spanish Christian influences feels, to her, like a quiet argument against the purity politics of any era.

Tickets for the next performance will go on sale through the community centre in Sydney's eastern suburbs six weeks before Purim, with proceeds split between the company and a local Jewish welfare fund.