fri 29/03/2024

Flamenco Sin Fronteras, Paco Peña Dance Company, Sadler's Wells | reviews, news & interviews

Flamenco Sin Fronteras, Paco Peña Dance Company, Sadler's Wells

Flamenco Sin Fronteras, Paco Peña Dance Company, Sadler's Wells

Spain and Venezuela, allure and sex, mystery and invitation - a great contrast

Spain and Venezuela are two countries divided by a common language - in dance and music, as well as in culture. Hence the hook for Paco Peña’s latest production, Flamenco sin fronteras, which while wearing a faintly anthropological air also packs a lot of ebullient performance skills and talking-points. Contrasting “high” Cordoban flamenco (and in Charo Espino and Angel Muñoz, Peña provides two of the most refined dancers to be found in any style) with gutsy, African-influenced flamenco from Caracas, makes for a direct comparison of sex and allure, earth and fire, of relaxed, open-hipped, four-square Afro-Latin drumbeat and the tautly strung, buttock-clenching, almost oriental mysteries of Iberian flamenco-guitar rhythm.

Such musical interest alone, then, should make a visit to this show worth it, and one should go anywhere to see Espino and Muñoz in extended solos, she with her poised, elegantly sinuous femininity and exquisitely florid hands, he with his listening ears and feet as light and fast on the floor as a tabla master’s fingers.

So why can’t I give this an unequivocal recommendation? Well, there are a number of drawbacks, the major one perfectly correctable, just by turning the damned amplification off.

It’s that Sadler’s Wells paranoia about live music, once again, obsessively funnelling all live performance now through megawatt loudspeakers, providing a blighting wall of amplified sound so thick that you can’t tell who is singing or drumming. I think it bad manners to both audience and musicians that a spectator must peer through the half-light at each face, trying to work out where the voice in the box is coming from, and bad manners in particular to great dancers when their percussive skills - which in Muñoz's case are masterly musical skills - are betrayed by blanket miking and all their momentary subtleties of foot intonation on unpredictable floor are lost.

I tried two seats, expensive front stalls and cheaper back row ones, and I urge you to save your pounds and increase your enjoyment level. The three singers all have powerful lungs and roar fortissimo into their head-mics (the very stout Immaculada Rivero has the most raucous voice I’ve ever heard on a woman) and to be near the loudspeakers is painful.

paco_pena_4_lead_dancers

The second major drawback is common to every flamenco show - you have no idea what the singers are bawling so passionately into each other’s faces, since Sadler’s provides not even the smallest note on the lyrics (yet if you read into flamenco lyrics you are sucked into a world of boiling emotional cataract in miniature - most songs are only a few lines long but many come laden with precisely eloquent metaphor).

The set-up is more of a fancy concert than a staging, with the 15 performers in front of long white drapes like newly washed shawls hanging out to dry, which range from moody shadows (picture above, credit Daniela Charo) to a finale lit with gaudy red, yellow and blue like the countries' national flags, an unnecessarily cheesy touch (director Jude Kelly).

The Spanish band, wearing black, sit on the left - Peña’s silver head discreetly in among them - and the Venezuelans, wearing white, on the right, and the menu of music and dance allows a constant dialogue from one continent to the other. Peña’s reputation is probably almost more classical than rural gipsy, and this show hands the rough, raunchy stuff definitively to the South American contingent, headed by their clarion-voiced singer Carlos Tález and some stonkingly exciting group drumming on primitive skin drums. Diego Alvarez hammers out a solo on cajón, the box drum, as if it were an entire drum kit, contriving to be both blistering and laid-back at once.

Below: watch Alvarez with cajón and drums:

Yet in the group finale two of the Venezuelans fingerpick out some almost baroque dainties on their guitars, as if to fool the stereotypes, until Ramírez mockingly moves into an extravagantly polite set of variations on “London Bridge is falling down”, before joyously erupting in a pulverising assault of fingernails and knuckles against strings and wood that turns even a guitar into a percussive instrument. That sound inflects the dancing of Daniela Tugues, who unlike the serpentine Espino (an “up” dancer) thuds her feet hard down into the floor, waggling her bottom and spreading her legs in some very fetching squat jumps, a touch Martha Graham. She tosses her ponytail wildly (Charo Espino’s chignon remains impeccable throughout), and flaps her skirts wide and welcoming, where Espino winds hers tight around herself, an untouchable.

Pena_CarlosMeanwhile there’s Peña, travelling through “Little Venice” in a civilised and beguiling instrumental interlude, Serenata Venezolana, seguing from drawing-room classical to rustic folk duetting with Sandoval’s bandola, a complex kind of Venezuelan guitar. Pena is nearing 70 and his fingers aren’t quite so fleet, but they remain fastidiously pretty in their effects, the polar opposite of his Latin-American colleagues. Electicism isn’t easy to pull off without lowering the flavour quotient, but in Flamenco sin fronteras once again Peña proves a kindly master of it. Can they insist next time that Sadler’s turn down the volume?

Listen to Sandoval playing the Venezuelan bandola:

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