NIGHT IS A WOMAN.

NOCHE FLAMENCA

JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE FESTIVAL
LEE, MASSACHUSETTS
AUGUST 24-27, 2000

I thought Noche Flamenca was wonderful the first time I saw them in 1993; they have become even more wonderful in the intervening. years, as their highly successful debut at Jacob's Pillow proved.

In the early and mid-1990s, Artistic Director Martin Santangelo and Soledad Bario danced together. He had then the most beautiful arms I've ever seen on a male flamenco dancer, but his career was profoundly altered by a back injury that kept him away from the dancing stage for several years. It was touching to see him onstage again at the Pillow as a haunting dramatic presence at the back of the stage or as part of a cluster of men. The injury that cut into his career and took him off center stage has deepened his awareness of theatrical presentation, and his stagings are vivid and striking. This performance opened with a semicircle of men at one side of the stage, singers, dancers including Santangelo, and musicians with heads down communing in the low light. And in another stunning opening tableau, La Plaza, the dancers sit on chairs dispersed through the space, bent over in profile, as if heavy with anguish.

The jewel in Santangelo's crown is Bario, his wife, a dancer of uncommon power and intensity; a very great talent. This time she struck me as virtually elemental in her dancing--so pure and heated she seemed to be one of the elements that comprise the earth. Her demonic, ferocious Solea, which closed the program, had the quality of a compelling interior monologue, almost Japanese in its abstraction, distillation and beauty.

Santangelo surrounds Bario with complementary dancers. Tall, lean Bruno Argenta made his own sparks fly in the Farruca. The youthfully earnest and charming Noe Barroso and his partner, the delicate Alejandra Ramirez, make a team to watch; in the Alegrias, Eva Marin, tall and stately, portrayed the other woman to the two. And in her own Alegrias later in the program, Ana Romero was saucy and good-humored.

In this marvelously balanced program, the music-makers were inseparable from the whole, as they are in the history of flamenco itself. Jose Valle, "Chuscales," was brilliantly mercurial on the guitar, going beyond the notes, while Arcadio Marin was finely anchored and lyrical in his playing--yin and yang. Silverio Heredia and the higher-voiced Antonio Vizarraga sang the raspy-throated style that is flamenco, giving rough elegance to the sound. Percussionist Jose Antonio Galicia, with his hand drums and boxes, further energized the splendid ensemble.