Dansa Valencia.

Dansa Valencia, Spain's annual showcase for contemporary dance, celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. The festival departed from its usual profile of independent dance companies by including the Compania Nacional de Dansa. Its program, performed by an ensemble in splendid form, included director Nacho Duato's Cautiva ("Captive") and Por Vos Muero ("I Die for Thee"), the latter inspired by Garcilaso de la Vega's verses and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish music, as well as a sharp rendition of William Forsythe's witty Herman Schmerman.

Normally a bastion of modern dance, Dansa Valencia has opened its doors to contemporary flamenco, which has taken some exciting new directions recently. Arrieritos Somos ("We Are Muleteers," from the Spanish saying, "We are all muleteers and eventually our paths will cross"), a collective work by La Duna Danza, is exemplary of the new collaboration between contemporary dance and flamenco. It takes advantage of flamenco's driving rhythmic element as well as the easy torso and use of space and gravity characteristic of contemporary dance in Spain. The result is a solidly crafted, well danced, and appealing production.

Cesc Gelabert, who received a long overdue National Dance Award from the Spanish government in 1996, presented Armand Dust 2 and Thirst. The former maintains Gelabert's longtime custom of uniting interesting movement with thoughtful aesthetics and clear ideas and presents a power struggle between very distinct characters, each anchored in a specific time and place. The stunning Thirst maintains Gelabert's wonderfully fluid vocabulary and talks about desire. It is the movement itself, beautifully executed, that illustrates the increasingly powerful urges which motivate the dancers.

Barcelona's Mal Pelo brought its ensemble work, La Calle del Imaginero ("The Street of the Image Maker"), to Valencia. Experts in the creation of characters whose genius lies in their vulnerability, choreographers Maria Munoz and Pep Ramis build a world out of a solitary street in which gesture takes on new symbolism. An exquisite wooden set gives the dancers niches, corners, and crannies within which to develop their internal and external environments.

Provisional Danza, the Madrid-based group led by choreographer Carmen Werner, framed her work in a darkened room illuminated by candelabras. Mirrored panels define a space, outside of which, one intuits, a war rages. Inspired by Brecht's Mother Courage, Werner's portrait of female strength in times of duress is her most mature creation to date. Coraje, Escena 13 ("Courage, Scene 13") displays a greater breadth of movement and conceptual focus than her previous work. It is an effective, often very moving, production.

The audacity of Sol Pico's Razona la Vaca ("The Cow Reasons"), in which she reminds us of the beast that lives within us all, is enough to wake up even the most dance-glutted audiences. Brief leather costumes with rubber tubing; live electric guitar, drums and saxophone; leashes for the dancers and a Serrano ham swinging from a chain combine with Pico's fey humor and vivid stage presence in a production whose overall development cannot compete with its initial impact.

Mixed programs of short works are another characteristic of Dansa Valencia's programming. This year choreographers from Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Andalusia, Murcia, and the Basque country presented new work, including the prizewinners of the 1996 Certamen Coreografico de Madrid. Dansa Valencia also featured Ananda Dansa's new production of Homenaje a K ("Tribute to K"); an overview of the Ballet Contemporani de Barcelona's twenty-year history; Vicente Saez's Atman ("World Soul"), and a gala performance of dance from Spain and Latin America.

Dansa Valencia doubles as the city's principal dance season and a showcase for booking agents and theater and festival directors. As such, there is sometimes confusion about the criteria used to choose productions. Political and financial factors, as well as the taste of the local audience, must often be taken into account @y the programming committee. Suck a mixture of objectives often renders uneven results, not so much in the productions themselves (although works that must be made to fit in unsuitable spaces with insufficient set-up time invariably suffer) as in the overall view of what is happening in the field. All this said, Dansa Valencia remains an important window on what's happening in Spanish contemporary dance, an intense four-day event which the city embraces in its inimitable fashion.