Festival Flamenco International 1996.

POPEJOY FINE ARTS CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO JUNE 3-15, 1996 REVIEWED BY JENNIFER NOYER

Great Spanish theater at the tenth Festival Flamenco International brought record-breaking audiences to their feet. The University of New Mexico has become a world center for the study and viewing of flamenco art over the last decade. Audiences and students for the festival have grown to include students from Europe, Asia, and South America, as well as the United States. Founder and director Eva Encinias-Sandoval believes this is the largest event of its kind in the country.

The festival celebrated its tenth anniversary with an expanded offering of classes in flamenco dance technique, repertory, guitar, cante (song), composition, and a three-day conference on the history of flamenco featuring Angel Alvarez Caballero, considered the leading authority on flamenco in Spain. Just as Spanish and English have evolved and broadened their vocabularies through exposure to many diverse cultures, the language of flamenco music and dance has absorbed new contemporary elements to expand its range of expression.

The entire company of Antonio Canales's Ballet Flamenco, brought to Albuquerque from Madrid, presented a beautifully integrated example of this nuevo (new) flamenco with its dance-drama Torero (The Bull Fighter). Choreographed by Canales to music composed by Jose Jimenez, the ballet presented the Spanish bullfight as a surrealist metaphor for the heightened experience of life in the shadow of violent death. The movement stayed always within the fundamental rhythms and gestures of traditional flamenco, but drew on the broad expressive range of torso movement in the modern dance tradition.

Jimenez added flute, violin, and cajon (an electronically amplified box struck percussively with the hands) to the traditional guitars and palmas (clapping) to create a more universal sound, with African rhythms growing organically within the traditional gitano rhythmic structure.

Torero opened with stark shafts of light (designed by Sergio Spinelli) falling on Canales, the matador, dressing for the fight in front of a mirror. He moved through the cape passes, the lunges, and swift, sharp swivels of the hips, advancing and turning to the guitar's rhythmic urging. The haunting sound of an amplified exhalation of breath presaged a last breath of life, and a ghostly image of Florencio Campos, as the bull, appeared momentarily in the mirror. As the barechested, black-boleroed bull, Campos later demonstrated sensitive attention to every detail of the animal's stance, posture, and movement gesture, executing exquisite precision in his pawing zopateado (footwork).

One beautiful vignette revealed two female figures, a mother and a lover, danced by Patricia Torrero and Elena Santonja. They reached with deep torso contractions to hold and protect, then preened with pride, swirling fans and skirts, and stamped their heels and feet with sharp unison precision.

The highlight of the work came with the bull seated center stage on a chair, two lances protruding from behind, and two picadors dancing furiously at each side. The trio was lit from below, their shadows projected above the space of the arena, revealing the embattled bull pursued by horsemen. What great theater! The concluding victorious celebration, with the assistant toreros and their ladies, used a klezmer band as accompaniment, an unusual musical element introduced by Canales and Jimenez as tribute to the Sechardic roots of flamenco instrumentation and song.

The festival closed with the Fiesta Flamenca, demonstrating primarily the more traditional style of gitano flamenco with a series of shorter dances. The opening Martinete was a stunning quartet of dancers accompanied by sharp, and quite military, percussive rhythms. Nacho Blanco, Eva Encinias-Sandoval, Joaquin Encihias, and Marisol Encihiaslbarra progressed downstage with sharp taconeo (heelwork), shading the sound from soft to loud.

Canales introduced a Hamlet-like introversion into his Seguir,va (a solo with overtones of death) that progressed to angry, thrusting arm gestures and fast, turning jumps. Campos and Torrero performed Pareja (the couple) using lies and falls in a more modern idiom to express a courtship, with nonflamenco touching and animalistic, birdlike gestures.

The Solea por Bulerla, a spoofing dance of courtship and sexual conflict, was danced with elegance and an extreme energy by Campos and Tacha Gonzales. The audience demanded and received two encores, unwilling to let these dynamic artists leave the stage.