Dance
Flamenco foothills
Ruth Rees
Curiously enough, the British and the Spanish have more in common temper- amentally than most other European coun- tries, and I believe this springs from a characteristic shared by both: a fun- damental wildness, which contributed to a loosening of inhibitions this week at Sad- ler's Wells where the Cumbre Flamenca company is appearing for the third year running. The full house yelled, whooped and applauded not only wildly but also indiscriminately; if nothing else, it showed how starved of flamenco we are in Britain, and hungry people rarely insist on haute cuisine. As far as the audience were concerned, the dancers could do no wrong; anything that moved was cheered. But although the production is subtitled 'the dance', it was left to the guitarists and singers to justify the company's name and reach the peaks, leaving the dancers in the foothills.
Cantaores Pedro Montoya, Rafael Fajar- do and Alfonso El Veneno covered the whole range of serious flamenco singing; while the young female singer La Tobala sang a charming Bambera with El Veneno. Montoya's Solea scaled one of the even- ing's summits; if a nightingale could sing flamenco it would sound like this. How sad then that this most ardent example of serious flamenco should have been danced with such lack of finesse and understanding by Juana Amaya. Her interpretation set the seal on the entire evening, in which the different kinds of dance displayed a re- markable sameness in execution: sudden convulsions of activity punctuated by too much heel-stamping zapateado and then an incomprehensible cessation of movement when the dancer would take a desultory stroll around the stage. Nothing could be more unlike flamenco than such abrupt transition without continuity of line.
My hopes rose when Angela Granados, accompanied by guitarists Pedro Sierra and Antonio Moreno, started a Taranto. Un- like Amaya she looked like a flamenco dancer, but she lacked the profundity required and obviously found nothing wrong in flashing the odd smile during this most majestic and sombre of dances. La Chana, the audience's favourite, played up to the traditional flamenco role of the older, plumper woman whose knowing ways and abandon always bring down the house. But none of the three women could summon up a centimetre of line. On this depends the full impact of flamenco: the turn of a wrist, poise of upper torso, grace of head and shoulders, sensuous curl and coil of arms counterpointing the urgency of movement below the hips. How many of those present, I wondered, had memories of Rosario, Pilar Lopez or Lucero Tena, who could provide more excitement in the subtlest shrug of shoulder than was gener- ated in the combined flouncing I witnessed at Cumbre Flamenca?
Perhaps the very concept of the com- pany is counter-productive, for many of the dancers have their own groups back in Spain and only get together for a few months a year to go on tour.
The director Francisco Sanchez chose to present this company on a dark, bare stage. Was this because he feels that flamenco is too serious a matter to be damaged by colour? If so, he has missed the whole paradox of flamenco: that its impact derives from the contrast of its deep (but not always anguished) themes and the stunning sunlight and primary colours of Andalucia.
Perhaps the Sherry Institute of Spain, who supported the show, will encourage other flamenco companies to come to Britain. This might help in raising the standards of both performance and audi- ences, and usher in a new generation of flamenco bailaoras worthy of their famous predecessors.
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