DANCE REVIEW : Accent on Style in Benitez Flamenco Program

Sometimes, at the end of an unraveling day that threatens to have no end, you may look to performers you have come to see for clues about physical survival. If they are flamenco dancers, you end up saying, “Oh, I see--you just stare life down. Then you rage a little and lament a lot.”

With the five dancers of Santa Fe-based Maria Benitez Teatro Flamenco, this prescription was offered with a lot of style on Saturday night at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Benitez herself dwelled in the land of smoldering gesture. For “Aires de Silencio,” hauntingly lit by Cecilio Benitez, she gathered despair in around her with languid or almost jerky sweeps of her arms. In her terre a terre dancing, there is a sense of hardship and weighted stillness, qualities also found, more frenetically, in the style of Alejandro Granados.

On the other hand, Ramona Garduno and Sara de la Pena used their torsos more freely, whether shifting curved arms on which circling hands became exotic birds, or accomplishing quick, shuffling stomps during which all limbs seem dartingly to extend and return to grasp a ruffled skirt.

Perhaps the most stirring extension of flamenco form (literally) came with a solo, simply called “Serranas,” by Alfonso Simo Rodriguez. Less of a slave to traditional quick changes of temper, he extended stretched limbs poetically and sustained a melancholy mood.