It’s easy to overlook the many thrilling features of purely formal beauty in Soledad Barrio’s dancing. Though wrist-circlings abound in flamenco, she can accentuate them so that they become spirals of smoke. Raising both arms with elbows sharply bent, she creates a geometry that’s very satisfying. She can also soften those elbows so that the raised arms become a single compelling crescent, facing up to the sky or down to the earth. As she stands with legs apart, the lines of her arms and legs answer each other like the bowl and base of a grand goblet. Her walk seems not a succession of steps but a single flowing movement.
It’s easy to forget the beauty of such moments because her dancing is invariably charged with intense drama — remarkably so, even by the standards of flamenco, itself an inherently dramatic form. In her stance, her rhythm, the way she addresses the light and the way she opposes head to shoulders, she goes straight for the expressive tension that seems to be at flamenco’s very heart. Mistress of suspense, she demonstrates that tension at the very start of a dance and never lets it slacken, while changing its nature again and again. She particularly excels in bringing a solo to a climax, only to show — as applause erupts — that this is a transition to some new and further drama.
Ms. Barrio, a New York favorite and one of today’s great dancers of any genre, is the star of the company Noche Flamenca, which was founded 18 years ago. This week the troupe is at the Joyce Theater. It’s good to watch it in one of New York’s best-known dance homes (though those of us familiar with the company miss the monthlong seasons, which allowed audiences to see how a production matured after two weeks or more).
The program at the Joyce presents several faces of flamenco. It features two guitarists, three singers and three dancers; on Tuesday, Ms. Barrio was the only woman. Eugenio Iglesias’s guitar solo offers us flamenco at its most lightly charming and trouble-free; later, Salva de María’s playing, often gentle, establishes a more ruminative, brooding mood. The three singers — Emilio Florido, Manuel Gago and (replacing Carmina Cortes) Miguel Rosendo — make a marvelous ensemble, not least in the rhythm with which their clapping and foot-tapping accompanies both guitar and dance. Mr. Gago has the kind of small, high voice that’s sometimes called a tenorino, but there’s nothing diminutive about the cascading fluency of his coloratura or the expressive vitality of his utterance.
In “Oda al Amor,” Ms. Barrio and Antonio Jiménez dance about love and death -- literally, since a hooded Death figure stalks the stage. Ms. Barrio ends it by accepting Death’s fond embrace: her face resting tenderly on his shoulder while his black cloak hides the rest of her body is a superbly eloquent image. Alejandro Granados prances rapidly onstage for a solo called “El Patuka” in high good humor: he delivers the solo like a series of rough sketches, often tipping over into absurdity, but with no end of panache. Mr. Jiménez, who is dancing with more crispness and upper-body elegance than seen in recent Noche Flamenca New York seasons, delivers a compelling “Caminando” solo in which he seems haunted, as much trying to escape something as to express it.
Ms. Barrio’s solo bears her own name: “Soledad,” which also means “solitude,” “loneliness,” “grief” and “remoteness.” It’s an existential drama, beginning with a circular pool of light on the floor. She, dressed in black, enters, casting a single shadow sideways as she claims attention with the meter of her feet; then she holds a long pose. Only now do the musicians enter and approach the edge of the light. She opens her arms to them, but remains in this separate zone, cut off from the others. As the dance develops, the light and mood change: it’s as if the music were no longer outside her but part of her spiritual isolation.
The many kinds of rhythmic footwork, all glorious, that occur during the solo — cascades, crescendos, accelerations and decelerations — are all part of one concentrated stream of consciousness. She is often still, but her stillness is always a preparation, a display of brimming intensity. Effects that have been electrifying in the past — sudden off-balance pivots on the spot where she then returns to a point of focus as if to a psychological fixation or freezes in powerfully back-bent positions — still occur brilliantly, but like passing moments amid a larger and consuming thought.
That thought continually moves on. While framing her face gorgeously with hands and arms like a wreath, she’s never saying “Look at me” but always “Where next?” Holding one arm flexed, she waits as if deciding; then she brings her raised hand softly over her face as if ruefully; and then pow! She’s off, her whole body driving her forth into the next adventure of her soul.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of the schedule information with this review misstated the length of the run. It continues through Sunday, not Tuesday.
Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca appear through Sundayat the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800, joyce.org.
This article has been revised to reflect the following co
No comments:
Post a Comment