REVIEW: Ana's smouldering show sweeps away flamenco cynicism
HOW CLOSE sultry midnight Spain seemed at the Pavilion. Shady lighting. Black-clothed musicians, likewise singers. Tension and sensuality hung in the air. Lightning crackling from 12 guitar strings.
And, like a fleeting Mediterranean thunderstorm, it was all over before the evening was old, when after two encores, hungrily consumed by the won-over audience, the six-piece company customarily strolled from the stage, as street musicians sauntering off to an alternative, waiting lamplit square or candlelit cafe.
Flamenco has been easily mocked by we buttoned-up British over the decades – raucously wailing voices, wild and repetitive guitar chords and rhythms, melodramatically-gesturing dancers with noisy and neurotic feet.
And unless we have acquainted ourselves with this art at first hand, abroad ourselves if lucky, for some of us our flamenco familiarity is merely with the clichs born of that historic alarmed cynicism.
The Pavilion audience was multi-national and we British were the majority. Not only acceptance but real involvement are actions and commitments of which we are now capable towards flamenco. There were bouquets from the crowd for the dancers, and that is something I have not seen at professional ballet in Worthing.
Flamenco dancing has been taught prominently in Worthing during the last couple of decades. Here now was a Brighton-based Crdoba native, Ana Duenas Len, and her guitarist-composer brother Jos —his songs have been in film and on TV including Ugly Betty and The Shield). And they were performing with some of the top artists in today's Spain.
The old caricature was nowhere to be seen or heard. Stirring, unpredictable dissonance in the guitars. Percussive effects of the guitarists' fingers on their soundboards established fresh rhythmic patterns augmented by the handclaps of the singers and watching dancers.
The vocals suddenly made sense when one remembered the geographical proximity of Iberia to Arabic north west Africa — a musical source whose Moorish mystery is now embraced by many British as the world becomes ever smaller and other cultures ever closer.
Ana appeared in long dresses of pink, then black with a blazing red lining, then finally a shot-satin one that was bronze in the lighting for the long and sensuously joyous Alegrias and then purple under that for the closing Fin De Fiesta duet with solos. Her ravishingly long, dark, tousled hair was decked in flowers of complementary colours.
Jorge Muelas joined her in a white shirt, then with a dark brown suit slipped over it for his electrifying Solea Por Bulerias, then a waistcoat, tie and dark jeans for the second set which he began with a Farruca, also a virtuoso solo.
The most artistically enduring quality that hit me was the dancers' contact with the audience, with its inevitable feedback. And the dance is about the personality on show.
Flamenco is three Ps: pride, passion and power and its portrayal by the individual, in apparently complete freedom.
The dancer can create his or her own narrative, tell her own happy or tragic tale, or he betray his own seething or troubled emotion. Real connection takes place, despite no common spoken language between artiste and viewer.
Awakening has taken place. I shall not hesitate to see more.
Amor Flemenco's show, Pur (Love Flamenco's show, Pure) is at the Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, on October 23.
www.trinitytheatre.net
www.amorflamenco.co.uk
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Tuesday 14 February 2012
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