Gypsy Flamenco, via Dallas and Gotham

Though many people come for the fiery dancing, the true aficionado knows that flamenco is a marriage of cante (song), baile (dance) and toque (guitar playing).

“It’s always a conversation,” says Jason McGuire, music director of the New World Flamenco Festival, which runs through Sunday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“To see the interplay between the guitarist, the dancer and the singer--that’s for me where the magic happens. That’s why I play in a company. I also play solos, but my joy is having that conversation.”

McGuire, 31, was speaking from San Francisco, where since 1997 he’s been musical director of Yaelisa and Caminos Flamencos, the troupe that dances Tuesday and Wednesday in Irvine. Yaelisa also is the artistic director of the festival.

Compania Belen Maya from Madrid will close the event Friday and Saturday. Workshops, master classes and related activities continue throughout the week.

A native of Texas, McGuire, also known as “El Rubio” (the Blond One), began making his flamenco career after arriving in New York when he was 25. He was in the right place at the right time.

“I started to work with two Gypsies,” he said. “Both of those guys were open-minded and kind enough not so much to teach me but to make sure I was included. They would hire me to back them up whenever they could. From then on, I started to get work, because these two guys noticed that I had a talent for flamenco.”

He had started out studying classical and jazz guitar at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas.

“Technique-wise, classical and jazz guitar are two opposing instruments,” he said. “You play one with a pick, the other one with your fingers. I was torn between the two for a long time.”

Hearing the famed flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia triggered a change. “The light bulb went off,” he said.

But he didn’t begin seriously studying flamenco immediately.

“It seemed impossibly hard,” he said. “When you’re 20, you don’t know if you want to get into something that heavy. It took me a few years to commit to it. But once I committed, I spent eight hours a day practicing to become fluent in the language.”

McGuire says the flamenco idiom is unique. It’s all in the right hand.

“Every other [guitar] style, as far as the left hand is concerned, is the same. The right hand in flamenco, you play very percussively. Sometimes you’re hitting the string in the opposite direction you would pluck it. That strength takes a lot of time to develop. And there’s no definite way to learn it. You get a lot of conflicting advice. There’s no method.”

McGuire was one of four finalists in the 1988 American String Teachers Assn. National Classic Guitar Competition. In 1995, he recorded with Carlos Heredia on his “Gypsy Flamenco” CD and with Jesus Montoya on his “Sentimento Gitano” CD. McGuire is working on his first CD, which he expects to finish this summer.

He began working with Yaelisa as a guest artist in 1996 and soon moved to the West Coast.

“She’s a beautiful woman,” he said. “I was in love.” The two married last year and have a daughter, Rachel Camela McGuire.

“It’s my mother’s name. We’re American, but the name ‘Camela’ in the Spanish Gypsy language--which is different from Spanish--means ‘love.’ Blows me away.”

Although purists may decry the influence, flamenco, which has always been a hybrid, is currently borrowing from American pop music, according to McGuire.

“Flamenco does not borrow melodies, he said. “Melodies are very particular. But over the years, you could see new rhythmic concepts introduced to flamenco which you could trace back to a song that was popular at the time. In the later ‘70s, for instance, you could hear flamenco players accenting a tune where the Bee Gees accented a tune. That’s interesting to me.”

Although such borrowing doesn’t bother him, McGuire does have some negative opinions about the current state of flamenco, as do most aficionados.

“In Spain right now, the shows I’ve seen lately, there’s not much improvising going on,” he said. “They’re trying to be more commercially acceptable to a broader audience. But for somebody who loves flamenco, the typical aficionado loves to see improvisation.”

The rehearsed shows are incredible, McGuire said. “They’re not weak at all. They’re polished and doing things that are very difficult. But I don’t know whether flamenco was intended to be refined.”