Modern day Gypsies

Six years ago on a rainy day, painter Lee Shin (李昕) was sitting alone in a gallery, hosting nobody for her first solo exhibition. Then a man with heavy eyebrows and a youthful demeanor strolled in and began inspecting her works, as if he were a judge or critic.

"Each of your works is like a dance," he said to her.

"He told me he was a Flamenco dancer from an amateur troupe," she recalls.

"That is a very profound dance," he said, exploring the gallery with her.

"I later realized he was the only dancer in the 'troupe'," she says. "But by the time I realized it, I'd already fell in love with the dance - the beauty and passion, the joy and sadness of Gypsy's lives."

Lee Shin and Lin Keng (林耕) would go on to found Fuego Fantastico (迷火佛朗明哥舞坊), one of Taipei's leading amateur Flamenco troupes. Since their first encounter, there have been many summer evenings through the years when they have found themselves dancing feverishly with the classical guitar and clapping hands at local pubs, trying to bring an exotic sentiment to the urban canyons of Taipei.

"This dance troupe was a result of playing too much and playing too far with my life," Lee says, jokingly.

A life left behind

Before "the dancer" Lee Shin, or even the painter Lee Shin, there was Lee Shin the dentist, employed at a public hospital for more than a decade. She was a career woman with an affluent income, the wife of a successful businessman and the mom of a 10-year-old girl. She was well-off and secure.

But security was never what she'd been looking for. "I wore white robes with mask, facing my patients everyday. But I felt out of touch with people and life," she says. "Of course you can find senses of achievement in curing people's illnesses, but ... teeth problems are, essentially, never solvable. You solve a problem and then there comes another. More and more you feel your life is repetition."

So Lee began her search for art, at the age of 35, by painting and then dancing. She soon gave up her million-dollar income, and eventually her status as a middle-class family hostess. In the end, she and her husband also separated.

"I began to appreciate men, not because of their wealth and status, or their potential for success," she recalls.

Intrigue and intimacy

It was the ethnic culture and the graceful feelings of Flamenco that charmed both Lee and Lin. From 1994, Lee and Lin began enthusiastically pursuing Flamenco, learning from videotapes, local teachers and foreign dancers.

As a full-time single mom, Lee had to make use of rare spare moments to learn the dance; for example, during the one-hour her daughter learned piano, or before the girl came home from school.

For many, Taiwan is rather sterile place to learn about Flamenco and the Gypsy arts. So Lin Keng, who is five years younger than Lee and teaches English at a junior college in Taipei, was usually busying surfing the Internet during his free time. He chatted and exchanged information with Flamenco fans around the world, mail-ordered CDs and tapes, and learned Spanish.

In 1995, Lee and Lin, Teresa Barja, a dancer, and guitarist Chan Che-hsiung (詹哲雄) began performing at a pub in Tienmu. Lin and Lee's obsession for Flamenco also lead them to make a pilgrimage to Spain two years ago, for a month of dancing lessons.

All this has led to a greater interest among locals in what they do. Nowadays, Fuego Fantastico has 20 members and Lin, being the leader, gives weekly performances at Taipei pubs. The troupe also gives weekly lessons at their hillside studio, with students ranging from housewives and writers to TV reporters.