Marin Sets the Mood for Flamenco Troupe

Distinctively skinny and surly, with a short contemporary haircut and black work clothes, Andres Marin prowled the stage of the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Friday looking more like a stagehand than the leader of an esteemed flamenco company from Seville.

Often standing in what an art student would recognize as the Gothic Slouch, sometimes scarcely moving but swaying very slightly to the music, Marin spent the early moments of the plotless, 90-minute “Mas alla del Tiempo” (Beyond Time) exploring a few bold changes of position and a series of slashing arm motions.

His tight black pullover, with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, heightened his intense gestural statements. But sustained step patterns were a long time coming. Compania Flamenca Andres Marin turned out to be as much about music as dance, so only when he had directed his attention and ours to the artistry of an unusually varied complement of accompanists did the real dancing begin.

Even then, it came only from Adela Campallo and Mercedes Ruiz, dancers who possessed Marin’s heat, energy and gestural style but also a technical polish that he resolutely avoided. Moreover, where Campallo and Ruiz mirrored or matched one another in long, forceful step patterns, Marin’s next solo continued to keep the audience off guard with only the briefest explosions of complex step rhythms, and his endings nearly always looked unplanned or even defiant.

Eventually, Marin came clean, dancing with the power of a jackhammer ripping up concrete but with spectacular musical acuity. Indeed, you might think of him as bringing to flamenco what Savion Glover brought to tap: state-of-the-art technique kept deliberately roughhewn and the refusal to flatter or spoon-feed the audience.

Toward the end of the evening, when his step flourishes grew incredibly intricate and prolonged, he would curtly kick toward the audience and then leave the stage with a scowl, conveying his disgust at wasting time on us, an attitude deeply embedded in flamenco tradition. Like black people in America, Gypsies in Spain were allowed to entertain the majority population but remained an abused and isolated underclass. And they resented the oppressors who paid them to perform.

So even though Marin’s haircut, clothes and dancing style seemed daringly anti-traditional, his concept of the dancer/audience relationship proved as old as flamenco itself--and still humbling, if you accepted all the implications.

Singers Pepe de Pura and Londro upheld the depth of feeling in classic flamenco vocalism all evening, with guitarists Juan Antonio Suarez “Canito” and Paco Iglesias offering refined support. However, Encarna Anillo dominated the music-making with a voice choked with tears, yet still unforgettably urgent and commanding.

The accordion of Rafael Alvarez flavored a sensuous tango for Campallo and Ruiz that blended characteristic Argentine rhythms with flamenco footwork. A more enigmatic sequence found Marin slowly crossing the stage, draped in an immense white, fringed shawl, accompanied mournfully by the viola of Jerome Ireland and the bass of Juanmi Guzman. After he dropped the shawl and left, without dancing a step, Ruiz picked it up to begin a restless, sinewy solo that depended as much on manipulations of that shawl and her long train as her footwork.

Percussionist Antonio Coronel completed the musical ensemble--larger than any heard at the Barclay’s New World Flamenco Festival this season. As the final attraction of the 10-day event, Marin left audiences with a musically rich but choreographically challenging statement of where he thinks flamenco is headed.

The antithesis of the indulgent pop-influenced flamenco fusion that briefly flourished on world stages in the late 1990s, it reinforced the art’s core values while stripping away the embellishments that leave flamenco linked to the past. Some audiences may miss the frills and polka dots, bolero jackets and glamour he has discarded, but something more essential remains, alive and definitely kicking.