In Step With Her Passion

In her cluttered, narrow dressing room at City Center theater, in a warmup suit with her face just cleansed of stage makeup, flamenco dancer Mila de Vargas still radiates quiet dignity and missionary passion.

“In flamenco you have to feel the dance, you have to feel the guitar, you have to feel the song,” the 51-year-old grandmother of three said in gentle, low-pitched Spanish. “You must have the kind of sensibility where, whether you have lived a long life or a short one, you can bring all your experiences onstage and transmit them to the audience. Flamenco is the lament that society allows us--it’s authentic expression, power, spontaneity, love. It is all of life onstage.”

Putting “all of life onstage” is not exactly what most dance classes concentrate on. Which is why Mila de Vargas is a highly revered artist with a unique place (her title is special collaborator) in the National Ballet of Spain.

In the company’s performances at the Pantages Theater this week, De Vargas has a central part in “A Ritmo y a Compas” (To Rhythm and Beat). But her broader role is to keep the true spirit of Spain’s most characteristic art form alive within the country’s official classical dance company. She is a sort of barometer of integrity for an art in which truth of expression is everything.

Flamenco is the soul of Spanish dance, says Nana Lorca, one of the National Ballet’s three artistic directors. “It is the style, the living spirit. . . . It is all feelings. The steps mean nothing in flamenco. It is what you can evoke through them.” A former lead dancer with Jose Greco’s company, Lorca is in charge of programming. She is a small woman who combines a direct, hands-on attitude (this interview had to wait while she played chimes for the opening of the company’s “Medea”) with regal authority.

“Classical Spanish dance is many styles; the regional, the escuela bolera, the flamenco all mingle in it,” Lorca explains. Escuela bolera dates from the 18th century and is related to early ballet, with lots of small jumps and beats done in soft slippers. There are various regional folk styles. There is the pure classical Spanish style, with its tautly arched posture and curving, flaring shapes. From flamenco come complex rhythmic patterns and footwork, a fierceness in performance and spirit.

Though flamenco can’t alone define Spanish dance, it is one way of defining Spanish culture--popular culture, at least. It is church and party, sex, art, passion and rhythm rolled into one. An ancient dance with roots in Gypsy, Arabic, Indian, Moorish and Andalusian cultures, it continues to evolve today.

To dance flamenco one needs vivencias, roughly translated as life experiences, something De Vargas has in plenty.

Trained as a classical ballerina, she stopped dancing professionally at age 18, when she married a gypsy guitarist. They had four children, and while living with him, De Vargas became immersed in the world of gypsy flamenco. Her husband died of cancer when she was only 30 (she never remarried), leaving de Vargas devastated. Her brother, who owned a tablao in Barcelona, persuaded her to start working with dancers there and gradually, to start performing, as a way to cope with the loss.

“When he died I needed to express everything that I was feeling, and the only way I could express it was by dancing flamenco,” De Vargas says. “What I felt, I put onstage.” Dancing helped bring her through that time, and still sustains her. “I feel a lot of things when I perform,” she says. “I feel everything from immense happiness to tremendous sadness. You feel all the vivencias you have had, everything that has happened and passed through you.”

“In this art, the older you are, the more of an artist you become,” says Lorca. When the younger dancers first saw De Vargas in class, Lorca says, they were skeptical of her middle-aged physique; but their opinion changed completely when they saw her dance.

“Mila is not old, she is mature,” Lorca says. “Maturity is very important. It is like a ripe fruit. When a fruit is green it has no taste. This is very dangerous in dance, because maturity comes close to the physical end. So it is a very limited time, but it is the best time.”

The preferred place to experience flamenco is in the tablaos, small clubs that allow for close communication between performer and audience. Within distinct rhythmic patterns, each with its own style and dramatic flavor--the rapid alegrias is lighthearted, flirtatious; farruca is intense and masculine; taranto is dramatic, tragic, sensual--the dancer improvises and interprets in close, fluid connection with the guitarist and singer.

When they all connect, it can be almost mystical. “There is something that comes from me, and something that comes from God,” says De Vargas. “It’s a fusion that I feel, something magical.”

But that doesn’t happen every day. “In the tablao it’s easier, it’s more intimate, you’re closer to the audience,” she sighs. “Here it’s very difficult, because you’re far away and alone onstage.”

“When you have to put [flamenco] onstage, you have to make it attractive to everyone, not just to the person that really understands it,” says Lorca. “You have to convey that intimate sensation in a more expansive place.”

“A Ritmos y a Compas” was created with all of this in mind. Unlike the company’s other flamenco works, which are a series of set pieces to the various rhythms, the work--created by Curillo, another acclaimed flamenco artist in the company--incorporates those rhythms into a romantic drama, set in a tablao. De Vargas choreographed her solo alegrias, and plays the duena of the club, whose daughter loves one man (played by Curillo), while her father wishes her to marry another to whom he owes money.

Lorca says the piece was made partly as a showcase for De Vargas, Curillo and the other lead dancers, but also as “an exposition of flamenco character and personality. Flamencos are really different people, very free, all passion, feelings.”

It is indicative of flamenco’s vitality that it continues to draw young performers and audiences, even as keepers of tradition like De Vargas are revered. In Spain, for example, flamenco dancer Joaquin Cortes, 25, has the audience and flashy image of a pop star. Trained at the National Ballet, he uses virtuosic ballet moves, has a legion of rabid teenaged female fans, poses for magazine layouts and does concerts where he enters bare-chested through the audience to thundering music and flashing lights; flamenco al MTV.

Artists like Cortes have been criticized for diluting the style, but, says Lorca, “I think it’s all healthy. [Classic] flamenco is for one kind of audience, the more modernized flamenco is for the kids. . . . Whatever is successful in dance is good for everybody, because people become more interested in dance.”

De Vargas is more measured in her evaluation. “People are dancing very well now, they have a lot of technique, a lot of training, they dance a lot. There are tremendously strong advances, and very beautiful and interesting ones. The only thing I ask is that they don’t lose the heart or the roots.”

Which is where she sees her greatest contribution to the National Ballet of Spain. “I think it is important for the young to have an example of someone older in such an ancient art. Because it is easy to forget. So it is important to them and to me. It is a kind of reciprocal luck.”

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NATIONAL BALLET OF SPAIN, Pantages Theater, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Dates: Wednesday to Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; and next Sunday, 3 and 7 p.m. Prices: $17-$57 Phone: (213) 365-3500.