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As models for choreography, even the greatest painters are of limited use. Dance, for all of its concern with stage compositions, is an art of motion; painting, even when it implies action, is static. But painters can provide choreographers with an angle of vision, a way of looking at the world.<\/p>\n
Each section of \u201cSearching for Goya,\u201d the program that Noche Flamenca is performing at the Joyce Theater this week, takes its title from a work by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. Most sections start \u2014 or start and finish \u2014 with a tableau-like staging of the image in question. The dancing doesn\u2019t exactly bring it to life. It\u2019s more that the image is a frame for the flamenco.<\/p>\n
\u201cSearching for Goya\u201d is in many ways a typical Noche Flamenca program. It has the company\u2019s signature virtues: excellent musicians (especially the core singers Manuel Gago and Emilio Florido); distinguished guest dancers (Jes\u00fas Helmo, Pablo Fraile and Paula Bola\u00f1os); and a climactic solo by its star, Soledad Barrio. The aesthetic is unostentatious, only the essentials. And all this aligns well with Goya. It jibes with his tragic realism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The show dares to take on scenes from Goya\u2019s \u201cDisasters of War\u201d series, and while the choreography (by Barrio, the other dancers and the director, Mart\u00edn Santangelo) lacks Goya\u2019s terrible explicitness, it has its own expressive power. When these dancers march like soldiers, they do so in frighteningly complex rhythms. When the sound of an artillery blast or firing-squad salvo simulated by feet struck against the floor, bodies jerk with a visceral effect that viewers of Goya can only imagine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The creepiest theatrical moment derives from \u201cLas Camas de la Muerte\u201d<\/a> (\u201cThe Beds of Death\u201d), Goya\u2019s etching of a hooded mourner and covered corpses. The dance represents this with a long white sheet that bulges as if with bodies. The mourner moves along her diagonal path and the sheet does, too. It lengthens and slides like a giant worm, an endless body count.<\/p>\n But mainly, Goya serves as a jumping-off point. The four colliding bulls of \u201cLittle Bulls\u2019 Folly\u201d set up a brilliant braiding of solos and ensemble bits for Barrio, Helmo, Fraile and Bola\u00f1os. One of Goya\u2019s depictions of a matador at work<\/a> inspires an elegant solo by Fraile. Goya\u2019s \u201cDisparate Puntual (Foolish Precision\u201d), which shows a circus performer riding a horse on a wire, occasions a solo of flirty grace by Bola\u00f1os, with the rest of the cast playing the crowd in grotesque masks that mirror Goya\u2019s squished faces.<\/p>\n Sometimes the image establishes a mood that the dance sustains. During Helmo\u2019s solo, based on Goya\u2019s \u201cPerro Semihundido,\u201d<\/a> in which all but a dog\u2019s head is submerged in a brown mound, Helmo keeps looking up at Florido, who sings down at him from a height. Helmo\u2019s gaze is the dog\u2019s, and his beautifully modulated dance extends the emotion, flamenco-style.<\/p>\n The most potent example is Barrio\u2019s turn. Her image is \u201cTwo People Looking Into a Luminous Room,\u201d<\/a> which roughly represents just that, with a doorway into a bright chamber that is only blank white space. Mark London\u2019s lighting comes in low from the left wing. Barrio is between it and the musicians, and she bounces back and forth, recoiling from and confronting the light.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There is little in dance as intense as a solo by Barrio. Over and over, she dives in, plunging somewhere deep, her articulate feet both pounding a way through and protesting at the same time. She pits her own dark luminosity against the light from the wing, which seems to represent death, a fact that this artist and company, like Goya, face unflinchingly. It\u2019s a mercy that \u201cSearching for Goya\u201d ends with the release of a happy party. After Barrio is done, everybody needs one.<\/p>\n Noche Flamenca<\/strong><\/p>\n Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n