La Tania’s Flamenco: Feet vs. the Music

There was a duel going on Wednesday night during the performance of La Tania Music and Dance at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. It wasn’t a contest between spirit and flesh or gripping and letting loose, which is often the case with flamenco. Nor was it the tension of tradition meeting innovation, although that’s the flamenco trend this company wants to join. It was more simply a fight for supremacy between music and dance, with music relying on the not-so-secret weapon of microphones to edge out unamplified feet.

As flamenco struggles to expand its theatrical range, choices about what to lose and what to gain continue to arise. In La Tania’s new 40-minute, four-person ballet “Abrazo” (Embrace), she kept the idea of onstage musicians behind successive soloists (with one brief duet and coda)--a reference to flamenco’s more intimate origins in private gatherings--and composer Juan Antonio Suarez added lovely cello (played by co-arranger Nicasio Moreno) and chimes or unusual percussion to his own deeply resonant guitar and two traditional singers.

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What La Tania lost was flamenco dance’s keen reliance on sudden impulse and improvisation--and, of course, the “instrument” of zapateados, of footwork, because that can be seen but not really heard. Instead, the emphasis was on beautiful shapes--often in low lighting--on even phrasing in short bursts; and on being on top of the music, as opposed to being in it. Whereas flamenco is often about journeying into the land of dangerously sharp emotions and thoughts, “Abrazo” was more about dancers looking good on the trip.

And look good they often did. Decorative in “Abrazo,” Alegria Suarez found a lively inner pulse with a lot of twists and turns in “AlmAire,” (which she choreographed with Andres Marin); and La Tania’s elegant carriage and smooth moves sparkled in her shawl-and-train-twirling solo “El Poder de lo Invisible” and in “Herencia Mora,” which brought back the feeling of improvisation at the end of the program.

More difficult to love, depending on your definition of a smooth mover, was Marin, whose hunched shoulders and jutting chin gave him a vulturesque quality, especially as La Tania’s moody partner in “Abrazo.”

In his own solo, “Emilia,” the new male style of whipping out truncated phrases then posing predominated (a la Joaquin Cortes). But Marin’s footwork was compelling, extraordinarily articulate and dense--especially when it could be heard clearly. Without microphones at dancers’ feet--and a newly defined relationship to onstage musicians--the shapes of change for flamenco can become unbalanced.

* La Tania Music and Dance continues at Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, tonight and Saturday, 8 p.m., and Sunday, 3 p.m. $22-$26. (714) 854-4646.