CHAPTER SIX NIÑO DE ELCHE, A HETEROPIAN (FLAMENCX) VOICE DANIEL VALTUEÑA During a concert by singer Niño de Elche that took place at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain) in 2016 in the frame of the multidisciplinary project Capital Animal, the performer said that the auditorium was going to be transformed by his music into a “tasca flamenca antimachista y vegana” (anti-machista, vegan, flamenco cantina). 1 A more than remarkable anecdote to engage with his public, this statement demonstrated how Niño de Elche was willing to create a non-normative gathering place through his music and performance. In this piece I want to introduce Nino de Elche’s body of work to a US reader and to focus on two aspects of his production that I consider to be extremely related to each other and highly relevant for an accurate understanding of his trajectory: his queerness and his continuous search for alternative venues where his music and actions can be performed. 2 To do so 1 Dani Cabezas, “El Niño de Elche: flamenco en clave animalista,” El Asombrario & Co, May 20, 2016, https://elasombrario.com/nino-elche-flamenco-clave- animalista/. I want to thank Anthony J. Harb for his writing advisement on this text. 2 Judging by my research, very few pieces have been written on Niño de Elche within the US context. I would like to highlight “Y Para Rematar: Contemplations on a Movement in Transition” by Niurca Márquez included in the volume Flamenco on the Global Stage: Historical, Critical and Theoretical Perspectives, edited by K. Meira Goldberg, Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum, and Michelle Heffner Hayes (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, 2015), 260–70, which dedicates a short section to him. Moreover, he has only performed twice in North America: once in March 2018 in the frame of the New York Flamenco Festival with a concert on Antología del cante flamenco heterodoxo and again in