Marquez Sets Flamenco Sizzling

Compania Espanola de Antonio Marquez arrived in Southern California over the weekend trailing some of the strangest rave reviews ever published about flamenco dancing.

One Italian critic, for instance, called Marquez “the last Narcissus,” and another lamented that his dancing showed how Spaniards, “our Latin-Mediterranean cousins,” have kept “all of those mythical sexual and sensual qualities of seduction that seem so important to us and that we have partially lost.”

On the current tour, one American reviewer dubbed Marquez “the Spanish counterpart of Irish American superstar Michael Flatley,” and another spent inordinate review space describing how Marquez’s trousers fit in the back.

Everyone seemed to recognize that a true phenomenon had arrived, and you could see why at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday. But whatever Marquez’s new status as international sex bomb may convey, it was a relief to find him sustaining the technical and dramatic excellence he had displayed locally six years ago as a guest artist with National Ballet of Spain.

Whether fully dressed or with shirt ripped open, in showpiece solos focused on percussive heel work or sexy duets with company women, his fine proportions, sensitive musicality, wondrously expressive hands and remarkable ability to put his full weight behind every shift of position yielded performances of memorable power and authority.

Add to these qualities his full-out intensity--plus an ability to communicate his feelings about what he’s doing--and you have the star presence that reviewers fall over themselves describing.

Six musicians and 10 dancers joined Marquez in Cerritos, with changes of lighting within a piece suggesting time passing and the development of relationships even in choreography that otherwise looked abstract. Marquez is a distinctively bold theater artist and, following his lead, his company projected a forceful, passionate style to the last balcony.

In Jose Granero’s “Reencuentros,” recorded music by Emilio de Diego launched a chain of male solos that evolved into an ensemble statement before the women arrived for the first of many depictions of blocked desire. Marquez’s intimate duet with Leticia Calatayud, for instance, propelled the rejected Trinidad Artiquez into a major solo with castanets, and then one of the brief partnerships dominating the rest of the piece.

Marquez returned for a spirited trio with Calatayud and Dolores Perez, but, as a whole, the choreography used traditional flamenco technique to highlight the formal spatial divisions and sexual politics of corps dancing.

Far more experimental in its vocabulary, Javier La Torre’s “Movimiento Flamenco” used music by company guitarist Diego Franco, putting the musicians at the back of the stage and beginning with the familiar sight of flamenco dancers seated in a semicircle of chairs, clapping along with solos performed in front of them.

Soon, this traditional format morphed into inventive, unorthodox uses of the chairs and the infusion of contemporary movement into the flamenco language. Marquez’s second solo, in particular, proved surprisingly buoyant, with all the up-from-the-floor motion representing a reversal of classic flamenco priorities. His dodgy, spasmodic hip action, and a steamy duet with Artiquez that ended with him on top of her on the floor, also violated norms.

His “Zapateado” solo, however, demonstrated his mastery of the intricate rhythmic patterns and meticulous variations in attack that define flamenco artistry. Beginning and ending with taped orchestral music by Sarasate, it reached its zenith in the unaccompanied central section: complex cycles of accelerating tapping steps, ending with air turns, a knee drop and a hand suddenly slammed onto the floor.

In its generosity of scale and feeling as well as its outstanding technical command, it was prime Marquez: star dancing that renews a great cultural heritage.

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Compania Espanola de Antonio Marquez appears Thursday at 8 p.m. at California Center for the Arts, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido; $20-$50. (760) 839-4120; on Friday at 8 p.m. at Smothers Theatre, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; $40. (310) 506-4522.