Maya Solos End Flamenco Festival With Flair

Madrid-based Compania Belen Maya was the third and final group featured in the New World Flamenco Festival at Irvine Barclay Theatre on the weekend. The 90-minute intermission-less program, called “Adir” (“Heritage”), focused mostly on solo strengths and rested securely on the appeal of the company’s three female dancers, especially Maya herself.

These days, flamenco solos for the stage are usually meticulously choreographed, but they tend to be erratically structured in an attempt to evoke improvisational energy, relying on sudden whirlwinds of movement, moody pauses and thickets of percussive footwork. All of this to try and capture the way heartaches, headaches and similarly strong states of mind are embodied.

It can be a problem when the intimacy of traditional flamenco is altered by large theaters, and energy doesn’t circulate the same way it does in smaller venues. That means the stop-start dynamic begins to wear, as it did briefly during a few very well-danced pieces on Maya’s program.

Working to reshape staged flamenco and keep it vital, new voices such as Domingo Ortega, who triumphed at the festival last weekend, are crafting gem-like works that experiment with flow and range of movement, making dramatic statements more succinctly than the “When I feel it, I do it” school.

On Friday night, Maya’s strongest offering was her “Solea,” to music by Gerardo Nunez. Wrapped in a long black dress, sitting in a pool of golden light, Maya seemed to sing this solo through gesture, creating a stream of consciousness at an anxious pace, sometimes almost chased by the guitar accompaniment, sometimes taking a stand against the relentless rhythm.

Her arms flew up as if spurred by painful memory; they sank in despair and windmilled with worry. Danced in, around and beside a wooden chair, the piece was short, bittersweet and stunning.

Rafaela Carrasco in “Taranto” was also a brooding delight. Curves seemed to travel through her body, stopping here and there for impulsive emphasis, warming her flesh into sinewy transitions and then cooling into a few angles.

The company’s two singers layered the mood: Encarna Anillo with a soprano sting, Rafael de Utrera with a more piercing sharpness.

Manuel Reyes choreographed the mild-mannered opening duet, “Tangos,” and danced it with Maya. Consisting mostly of side-by-side unison footwork, it almost called to mind an old-fashioned soft-shoe routine.

Reyes’ “Solea por Bulerias” showcased his mannered style--a sort of prizefighter-tilting-at-windmills look. He took awhile to find his groove, and the high point was his swift, light and clear footwork combinations, in which taps fell on top of each other or stretched out like multiple strings of pearls.

In another solo, “Alegrias,” Yolanda Heredia masterfully wrestled with the particularly heavy ruffled train of her bata de cola (dress with train). She dragged it, twirled it, kicked it and watched it like a tail, her expression reflecting the knowledge that she could, when she wanted, finally tame it.

In the opening and closing pieces, the women wore slim-lined contemporary clothing, a trend better known in Spain than Southern California.

Presumably, it’s more or less successful depending on how much you like a gray knee-length skirt and thin-knit gray cardigan replacing costumes with more spirit.

It’s not that the world needs more polka dots and red lace, but it’s very hard to enliven the plainer variety of street clothes.

Ushering the dancers onstage with gentle guitar were Fernando de Larua and Jesus Torres, with the latter providing a delicately pastoral solo of his own. An enthusiastic sold-out house echoed the general success of the New World Flamenco Festival, of which artistic director Yaelisa can be proud.