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The flamenco dancer Olga Pericet began topless, curled up on the floor like a beached mermaid or a woman recovering from a night of carousing. Her face was covered by a tightfitting mask with painted-on doll features. Later, she danced with a yellow raincoat over her head. She also stood on a bench in a pink wedding cake of a dress, with guitar-shaped cutouts festooning her arms, posing like a surrealist\u2019s conception of a religious icon.<\/p>\n
Her show, \u201cLa Leona,\u201d was as far out as this year\u2019s Flamenco Festival at New York City Center got. And still, it was rooted in the integrity of tradition. The heart of flamenco lies in the impassioned individual statement in a communal context, a musical conversation. So what might seem like improvements or expansions \u2014 elaborate group choreography, imaginative conceits \u2014 risk straying from the emotional core that makes flamenco flamenco. This year\u2019s festival showed the risks and the rewards. If the intensity of the dance selections was lower than in some previous editions, the range was wider.<\/p>\n
The festival didn\u2019t even start with flamenco. Instead, the Ballet Nacional de Espa\u00f1a began its program on March 8 with \u201cInvocaci\u00f3n Bolera,\u201d a modern evocation of the 18th-century escuela bolero, which is essentially Baroque ballet with Spanish poses and castanets.<\/p>\n
This was a welcome switch, and \u201cInvocaci\u00f3n\u201d had its charms, showing off a well-trained and large company. Eighteen dancers in period attire filled the stage, their castanets adding a chattering commentary to neat ballet jumps and turns, making them buzz. The choreography \u2014 by Rub\u00e9n Olmo, the group\u2019s artistic director \u2014 arranged the groupings adroitly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
A similar professionalism marked \u201cEterna Iberia,\u201d by Antonio Najarro, though here the style was 20th-century theatricalized flamenco. Percussive footwork was multiplied in tight unison, groups moved in handsome lines and circles, castanets trilled and soloists broke out in displays of expertise.<\/p>\n
Olmo\u2019s \u201cJaule\u00f1a,\u201d a shape-shifting solo beautifully danced by Inmaculada Salom\u00f3n, was more contemporary, mixing in modern-dance angularity. But the biggest difference between all this and Ballet Nacional\u2019s final selection, \u201cDe Lo Flamenco,\u201d was musical: a switch to live flamenco musicians from recorded orchestral compositions. At the Sunday matinee I attended, this change at least doubled the energy.<\/p>\n
Otherwise, \u201cDe Lo Flamenco\u201d \u2014 a tribute to the choreographer Mario Maya that gathers together some of his pieces with similar work by others \u2014 resembled \u201cEterna Iberia.\u201d Maya was a master of this mode: smoothly shifting picturesque formations, synchronicity, impressive soloists. But with the live, idiomatic music, it was as if the mode had been plugged in and turned on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Pericet\u2019s \u201cLa Leona,\u201d on Friday, benefited from excellent music all the way through. Guitars, vocals and percussion were updated with funky-fusion electric bass (played by the virtuosic Juanfe P\u00e9rez), but the thrust of Pericet\u2019s experimentation was scenographic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cLa Leona,\u201d or \u201cThe Lioness,\u201d refers to its star but also to a 19th-century guitar. The show makes an analogy between the body of a guitar and that of a woman, although Pericet dances in a man\u2019s suit, too. Her previous shows have been similarly eccentric in concept and costume, but I\u2019ve often found her dancing to be overly careful and calculated<\/a>. Not this time. Playing air guitar, Pericet strummed at crotch level. Declaring \u201cI am hot,\u201d she fanned those nether regions.<\/p>\n This was an artist having some fun. The comedy could be on the goofy side of dada, as when the percussionist and vocalist played rhythms with scissors. And dancing to a flamenco version of Thelonious Monk\u2019s jazz classic \u201c\u2019Round Midnight,\u201d<\/a> Pericet strayed unconvincingly into the realm of Twyla Tharp or Bob Fosse. But the overall impression was of an artist steeped in tradition trying to avoid boredom. The nuttiness was winning, and the music maintained the integrity. She finished at her most traditional, like Picasso reminding people he could draw representationally, showing off her rhythmic play with some rock-star wildness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The festival\u2019s concluding \u201cGala Flamenca\u201d is the most traditional format: musicians (here including the gale-force vocalist Sandra Carrasco) supporting solo dancers. Of the dancers, the most improved was Alfonso Losa. He is now an all-rounder, gorgeously re-sculpting arm positions mid-turn in perfect pirouettes, delivering rhythmic complexity and surprise in footwork both with and without the addition of a cane. And Miguel Fern\u00e1ndez Ribas, known as El Yiyo, was the most disappointing. Hailed as a new star<\/a>, he was loud, fast and awkward, not yet ready for prime time, not yet able to command a stage.<\/p>\n Choreographically, the strongest selection was a duet for Losa and Manuel Li\u00f1\u00e1n, who staged the show. Now facing off, now mirroring, now side by side, the men conveyed a dueling energy that was periodically amped up with tambourines.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Though Paula Comitre\u2019s footwork was muddy, she handled the long-tailed bata de cola dress and a fan with rare expressivity. Fanning herself in a deep backbend, she evoked melancholic languor. Spinning and spinning with the dress\u2019s tail trailing her, she looked lost, wrapped up in sadness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Li\u00f1\u00e1n also wore a bata de cola for his climactic solo. Such cross-gender costuming has lately become his signature. Dancing the serious form solea, he spun with enough effortful, tornado-like force that I half expected to see smoke. Like Pericet, Li\u00f1\u00e1n clearly knows <\/strong>the rules that he is bending. His idea of tradition isn\u2019t dead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n