Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca. Photo courtesy of Noche Flamenca.
To my knowledge, no Western dance form exists that loathes having narratives thrust upon it more than flamenco. Leery of losing the attention of the uninitiated in their audience, practitioners of this magnificent dance mode nonetheless keep trying to make their singular vocabulary tell stories. I’ve never seen such an attempt that didn’t end in failure—not simply theatrical failure but moral failure, because it’s a betrayal, a loss of faith in the very heart of the form.
The 15-year-old company Noche Flamenca, which usually prides itself on offering its flamenco pure, arousing feelings and perceptions that lie deeper than tales, has now succumbed with La Dama del Mar (The Lady From the Sea). It’s featured in the program that runs through August 14 at Theater 80 in New York’s East Village. Created in 2007 and now being given its local premiere, it was inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, which deals with the playwright’s familiar theme: women’s need for freedom. (Here, in contrast to Ibsen’s realistic A Doll’s House, the issue is glossed with the mystical atmosphere of deep waters.) The dance is the work of Martin Santangelo, the group’s director, who should know better.
Santangelo gives us a woman (Noche Flamenca’s already legendary star, Soledad Barrio) in a supple, unadorned white slip that is then covered by a tangle—a cage, you might say—of marine rope, her dark waving hair streaming down her back like seaweed. She’s joined by a devoted aging man and two young women. If you’ve read your Ibsen you’ll assume they’re the man’s daughters by his first wife, whom he also revered. (He’s that kind of guy.) But, to paraphrase Balanchine, there are no stepdaughters in flamenco. If you don’t know Ibsen’s play, the choreography doesn’t supply you with many clues to what’s going on, nor does the house program, which fails to offer a word about the action or name the characters, to say nothing of who’s playing them.
Enter a mysterious stranger—seedy, worn, perhaps menacing—and the lady is instinctively drawn to him. Ibsen provides us with the reasons—the woman’s affinity with the sea; a long-ago romance with the guy, who’s a sailor; and the lure of danger, for he’s been involved in a murder. He hovers in a dark corner, eyes steadfastly glued to Barrio, come to claim her, apparently, because they are destined for each other. The husband asserts his own claim (tritely, white scarves are used as symbols of these relationships). The rival men face off, the lights glaring down on Barrio, who’s caught between them.
Soledad Barrio in Martin Santangelo’s La Dama del Mar (The Lady From the Sea). Photo by Zarmik Moqtaderi.
I’d say this closing tableau leaves Barrio undecided between a safe berth and sexual adventure, but a colleague interpreted it as her telling both guys to go to hell. The play itself takes a third tack: the lady will stay with her legal husband once he understands that she’s free to go if she so chooses. Talk about concepts that are undanceable!
Apart from this ill-advised experiment with plot, Santangelo runs a terrific show. He employs singers who break your heart with the raucous intensity of their passion and despair, riveting guitarists, and two contrasting male dancers: Alejandro Granados, who represents pliancy, poetry, and immense self-contained dignity, and Antonio Jimenez, a maverick practitioner who keeps a sly eye on the flamboyant tactics of flamenco. And, putting them all in the shade, there’s Barrio, who is his wife. The cast members work as a team to provide mounting excitement, but she is still the one who takes you to places you might never have reached without her, emotional states that bare the toughest truths about human existence.
Her Siguiriya is the highlight of the program. She’s wearing—oh, to have access to her wardrobe!—a black, ankle-length, tiered chiffon skirt topped with a wine-red jacket and a wisp of a black scarf edged in small trembling tassels and sprinkled with even tinier paillettes. The jacket’s tight sleeves flare open at the wrist to frame her hands, the fingers curling and twisting, snapping like castanets or momentarily quiescent but sentient. All the while her feet are attacking the floor with staccato rhythms as if they were resolved to shatter it. When her face turns to the viewers, she seems not to see them but to be entirely absorbed in inner thought. Her head might be that of Egypt's Great Sphinx or some inscrutable Mayan goddess.
As Marcia B. Siegel has noticed, Barrio delivers her solos in chapters. One segment finishes, having gone as far as it can. A pause, and then the movement rouses up again, as if to tackle the same subject from a new angle. Slowly, her hair falls loose from its tight arrangement bordering the nape of her neck as her soul seems to stiffen within, in sheer determination to explore fully what most people find it safest not to think about. Her feet go on striking relentlessly, now actuating a trembling through her bare legs, exposed as she roughly raises her skirt. At the end of a section that seems to leave her exhausted, she keeps snapping her fingers at the musicians and curlicuing her hands at the wrists, apparently insisting that she still has something more to say. At this point you feel that the vehemence of her mere glance might turn its object—singer, guitarist, viewer—to stone.
The stage darkens. She moves to a light in the corner and crouches over it. Then, having been trailed by the musicians in a raggedy processional, she swivels to face them and rises to her full height, stretching her arms high. That final gesture reads as a triumphant announcement: Beyond death there is nothing to fear.
Noche Flamenca continues at Theatre 80 (80 St. Marks Place, New York) through Aug. 14, 2008. For tickets, call (212) 598-9802.
