Festival de Otono. - Teatro Nuevo Apolo, Madrid, Spain - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, March, 1998 by Laura Kumin

Flamenco has undergone mighty changes in the past few decades and today tackles a wide variety of subject matter. The three productions presented at the Teatro Apolo as part of Madrid's Festival de Otono (Autumn Festival) are representative of a growing tendency toward collaboration between flamenco and other disciplines. In music, flamenco "fusion" brings jazz, blues, and flamenco artists together. In dance, it usually means an amalgam of flamenco and contemporary styles, and excellent dancing can mask faulty choreographic structure.

Respected dancers Carmen Cortes and Antonio Canales have recently benefited from ambitious collaborations with prestigious Spanish theater directors.

For Salome, Cortes teamed up with director Gerardo Vera to express the fatal sensuality of Oscar Wilde's famous play. Always a dramatic performer, in Salome Cortes has found a role tailor-made to her expressive capacities, and she flourishes under Vera's skilled direction. Her strength gives unity to the piece when the ensemble's group choreography falters or when other central characters are occasionally overacted. The excellent Tony Fabre, formerly with Compania Nacional de Danza, imbues his role as the Nubian with serpentine sinuousness. Although the contrast between flamenco and modern dance vocabularies works in their interactions, the choreography did not show him to his full capacity.

In spite of these flaws, Salome has its structural skeleton in the right place. Vera's set design is effective, and his exquisite costumes make full use of a Mediterranean palette of colors and textures. Guitarist Gerardo Nunez's textured score is theatrical and evocative of the Middle East without losing its flamenco essence. Juan Gomez Cornejo's exquisite lighting deserves special mention.

Canales and director Lluis Pasqual examine violence in the two works that make up Bengues ("Devils"). In Suite on the House of Bernarda Alba, based on Federico Garcia Lorca's play of the same name, the roles of Bernarda and her daughters are played by men. Although that is not a new concept, Pasqual and Canales's treatment is subtle and sophisticated and avoids caricature through a suggestive balance of masculine and feminine elements. Canales as the rigid and controlling matriarch is at his dramatic best under Pasqual's guidance. In spite of certain liberties taken with the play, the production conveys the essence of repressed sexuality and violence expressed by Lorca. Among several outstanding scenes is the superbly directed encounter of mother and daughters around the dinner table, Rapping on the table, clapping, and with occasional heelwork, the rhythmic language of flamenco clearly expresses Bernarda's iron hold over her daughters. Other masterful touches include an impassioned adaptation of traditional sevillanas during an encounter with Pepe el Romano, the only man to interrupt the household's female trance, although Lorca chose to keep his presence offstage.

Variations on Guernica uses Picasso's famous painting of the horrors of war to bring another type of violence to light. Structurally inconsistent, the piece is nonetheless outstanding for the sheer animal energy and violence of Canales as the Horse and Juan Andres Maya as the Bull. Spaniards admiringly say es un monstruo ("He or she is a monster") when praising excellence. The phrase holds doubly true here to describe Canales and Maya's characters and the meeting of two formidable performers in combat. They roused a full house to a standing ovation and the sort of rhythmic foot-stamping, hand-clapping ovation rarely seen here.

Marco Berriel's Espejos de Viento ("Mirrors of Wind") lives up to the delicacy of its title. A former dancer with Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the Twentieth Century and an expressive performer, Berriel has collaborated with Joaquin Cortes, Carmen Cortes, Merche Esmeralda, and Lola Greco, guest artist with Ballet Nacional de Espana. Berriel has put together a first-class ensemble including Greco, actor Jose Luis Pellicena, and actor-singer-performer Francois Testory to illustrate a series of poems by various authors, none of whom, unfortunately, are cited in the program. Carlos Miranda's music, played live onstage, is as poetic as the texts recited by Pellicena.

Dreamlike and fraught with imagery, the piece opens with Berriel on a trapeze against a full moon in a dark and cloudy sky. Greco, an elegant dancer of immense technical and dramatic prowess, shows off her mastery of a wide range of dance vocabulary in a frothy alegrias. The series of episodes includes a hanging dance for Berriel on a circle of knives and a romantic encounter in a Spanish tavern with a spectacular patchwork backdrop of ruffled skirts, and gives the performers a wide range of emotional territory to explore. Although Espejos de Viento is refined and aesthetically pleasing, Berriel and Greco could do justice to more subtle, complex choreography.

Flamenco's deepest spirit will always remain an art to 6e appreciated in its purest form, but, as these three outstanding examples indicate, fusion is the wave of the future as far as theatrical Spanish dance is concerned.