Flamenco—Looking for a New Road

“Canciónes”
Caminos Flamencos
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco, CA
November 1, 2008

by Rita Felciano
copyright © 2008 by Rita Felciano

Thankfully the buzz around Flamenco Nuevo has somewhat died down since the middle eighties when efforts to create a contemporary form of Flamenco--by introducing ballet and modern moves danced to everything from Rock to Baroque--too often resulted in razzmatazz performances delivered with the numbing uniformity of a well oiled machine. So when Yaelisa, an extraordinarily eloquent dancer, announced a program with pop songs from Rosemary Clooney to Led Zeppelin, one had every reason to fear that she had halved jumped on a bandwagon that already has lost much of its steam, most certainly its novelty factor.

The concerns were premature. Yaelisa knows what she is doing, so do her dancers and musicians. In “Canciónes” Flamenco’s essence-- the solo, the “duende,” the tension between dance and music—was preserved.  Additionally, these dances to English-language songs opened narratives, which are part of Flamenco but, because of the lyrics’ lack of intelligibility, often are not that accessible even to Spanish speaking audiences. “Canciónes” was a step into the direction of more explicit emotional narratives, one that surely can co-exist with the more abstract dances that we are used to see.

Yaelisa divided the concert into two sections. Before intermission the dancers, performed mostly to taped popular music. The second half focused on Music Director Jason McGuire and singer Felix de Lola’s SONIKETE ensemble for which the dancers mostly performed back up. For a dance audience the second part looked a little thin. The group finale, in particular, felt too much like an afterthought. 

Songs by Iron and Wine, Rosemary Clooney, Randy Newman, Led Zeppelin and Nina Simone gave rise to solos for each of the company’s primary dancers: Yaelisa, Fanny Ara, Melissa Cruz and Christina Hall. Even though musically they couldn’t have been more different from each other, most of them were grounded in a dark vision of the world. Life is hard, relationships fail, you survive the best you can. This seems very close to the undercurrent of melancholy that girds so much of Flamenco.

In Sam Beam’s “Boy with a Coin,” six identically clad-in-white women rarely broke out of horizontally moving unisons. Gently repetitive beats inspired swaying hips, swiveling turns and liquidly rising arms. Once the dancers opted for a walking circle only to return to the inevitability of their lines. Given the way the dancers fit themselves into strict patterns, their fluttering fingers more than ever looked like escaping butterflies. With its sense of discipline, “Boy” was both hypnotic and disconcerting. At the end, one by one, the dancers sank to the ground a silent scream on their faces.

With her bata de cola sweeping the ensemble off the stage like so many fallen leaves, Yaelisa dove into Clooney’s “Sway” with the panache of a Las Vegas entertainer. With a wink to the audience, she turned her back to us and swayed and rolled her hips. With the broadest of smiles she strode across the stage and hopped to insistent musical passages. Stretched into huge side bends, she made sure we saw them, and she infused those insistent mambo beats with a teasing sense of freedom. Most interestingly, the bata de cola, instead of the costume accoutrement it usually is, here became the dancer’s partner.   

On a more serious note Yaelisa returned in “Rodeña”, a percussive solo to a score by McGuire on guitar and Michael Spiro on batá (horizontal drum) and cajón. It became a brilliant demonstration of Flamenco’s rhythmic acuity between dance and music. The give and take between her footwork and the musicians’ beats filled the stage with shimmering sonorities, sometimes darkly hued, sometimes scintillating. In the middle of the piece, the drums dropped out, and dancing with McGuire’s guitar became a moment of great intimacy that seemed to call up memories. With the simplest of gestures, Yaelisa touched the side of her head and ran her hand around her face. She could have been in a ballet.   

Ara is a fine-boned, delicate looking dancer but through the manner in which she interpreted Newman’s “God Song”, surely one of the most sardonically dark pop tunes, she became a huge Wigmanesque figure of despair. Abruptly dropping into a crouch, she looked like Sisyphus’ rock had squashed her. Grabbing her belly, she tried to hold in spilling despair. Dressed in black velvet, Ara made particularly imaginative use of her expressive arms. Windmilling they became the insistent engine that kept her going, in angular trajectories they seemed to reach for whatever was out there.

Cruz chose one of Led Zeppelin’s earliest successes, “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” Some thirty years ago, its screechy, screaming aggressiveness had a real sense of defiance to it. Now that edge is gone though Cruz’ singular interpretation imbued it with its share of high drama. The love object that threatens to drive the performer out of her mind is the Flamenco shawl. Spread on a chair, the red-clad Cruz approached it warily, her torso resisting the pull of that piece of alluring green embroidery. The shawl manipulations acquired a dramatic life, which spoke about the obsession and love/hate relationship a dancer has with her craft. But what really made this solo work was Cruz’ sophisticated rhythmic responses to those Zeppelin’s beats.

Nina Simone’s haunting “Blackbird” inspired Christina Hall to build a sculpturally eloquent solo around traditional images of the downtrodden. She took Flamenco’s iconic look and turned it inside out. Her back was bent; she dragged herself with arms lifelessly hanging down. Instead of fluttering hands that send energy flying into space, tight fingers pushed against each other for a sense of choking confinement.

In the central part of the post-intermission concert, SONIKETE’s musicians, including John Calloway who played the flute with one hand and the piano with the other, impressed with Flamenco Nuevo, some of it original, some of it interpretations of tracks from Spain. Heavily percussive, densely layered, its freedom had a heady jazzy energy which was greatly appreciated by the audience. But the star turn of the musical selections was McGuire’s who turned a “Bulerías” into a fiercely dissonant trajectory of overlaying and building complexities that brought the house down. It would have an astounding performance on an amplified bass; McGuire did it on his acoustic guitar.

The second half had opened with a lyrical duet, “Eurydice” with music by McGuire, for Ara and Yaelisa. It explored the relationship between a younger and an older dancer. At first both circled at opposite sides of the stage. Yaelisa then gradually drew Ara out of her self-involved turn. Finally they met touched, only to slip out of each other’s grasp. With its sense of Yearning, trying and accepting of what cannot be, “Eurydice” was as beautiful as it was simple. 

If Yaelisa has a signature piece, it would be her “Por Soleá”, first seen at the Ethnic Dance Festival a few years ago. It’s a darkly beautiful duet for guitar and dance so tightly interwoven that are never quite sure who follows whom. In this performance Yaelisa had majesty and grandeur in the inevitability of her big strides and ground-acknowledging back bends that at the flick of a hand burst into a firework of exploding steps and dizzying kicks and turns. And then there were pearly little interludes, intimate conversations between guitarist and dancer that spun off into new directions. Sometimes the piece just stopped as if time had seized to exit. This was Flamenco at its most profound--one dancer, one musician, one world.

Photo: Yaelisa by D. Belove