Tapping into flamenco

THE big news at the New World Flamenco Festival this year was the prospect of groundbreaking cross-cultural duets for tap phenomenon Savion Glover and flamenco diva Yaelisa, the festival’s artistic director.

Glover had already proved that his assaultive, supremely musical style could brilliantly embellish every idiom from progressive jazz to high Baroque, and Yaelisa had brought to the festival a constellation of innovative flamenco artists, dancing among them with distinction. What would occur when Glover and Yaelisa performed together?

Nothing, as it turned out: absolutely nothing. At the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Tuesday, the two dancers faced off in one improvisational collaboration after another. But only a few scattered passages of traded steps signaled connection.

Dancing to Miles Davis’ “Saeta” (on tape), Glover tapped magnificently but left no room for any kind of partnership -- so Yaelisa was stuck merely decorating his performance with flamenco poses and curling arms. A rematch to taped music by Da Lata and, in the finale, Yaelisa’s game attempt to meet Glover on his own turf developed their relationship only as far as uneventful simultaneous solos. A meeting of minds, personalities, techniques never happened Tuesday -- not with Yaelisa.

Where it happened is where it always happens for Glover: with the music. In his first foray into flamenco, he danced on a platform flanked by three guitarists, two singers and two dancers deeply skilled in that traditional Spanish idiom -- and blew them away. No, he never looked like a flamenco dancer and, initially, he danced in one spot with his arms behind his back, perhaps to help the audience focus on the only thing that mattered to him: the step rhythms.

Getting into a groove with the musicians, and staying there, Glover’s thunderous, unpredictable but amazingly clean foot-drumming annihilated the distance between the American street and the flamenco enclaves of Andalusia. He blazed with his singing/playing/clapping colleagues. Fusing with them, he proved again that you can enter a new world through sheer inspiration -- and take an audience along for the ride.

In the first half of the program, Yaelisa projected indomitable dignity and power in one extended flamenco solo, the extreme tension of her stance shattered only occasionally by bursts of galvanic action: sudden kicks, swivel turns, jutting hips, arms circling in front of her. You could interpret the performance as a showcase for intricate, often surprising rhythmic attacks or else see it as a character study about someone intent on maintaining absolute control, especially when overwhelming emotions threatened to shatter her composure.

In Act 2, she danced to recorded jazz by Dave Brubeck, but it drew nothing from her beyond the dexterity we’d already seen. Yes, how nice to watch her literally let her hair down and loosen up, but the result came a little too close to those unfortunate attempts by opera stars to sing pop.

In a solo of his own, dancer Andres Pena displayed a startling ability to radically shift direction, level and angle without disturbing his dazzling step patterns. An accelerating buildup of steps that kept switching from one leg to another, double turns, sudden-death terminations, all sorts of dodging and jumping eruptions: Pena seemed out to demonstrate that flamenco can be just as spontaneous as tap and no less exciting.

Throughout the evening, singers Manuel de la Malena and Luis Moneo provided mournful, atmospheric vocalism, and guitarists Juan Manuel Moneo and Domingo Rubichi served as accompanists, with the latter also contributing an unusually forceful, pithy solo.

In Act 2, festival music director Jason McGuire “El Rubio” supplied a more complex, contemporary concept of flamenco guitar and also joined in the full-company finale. Quite an evening.

The New World Flamenco Festival will conclude Friday through Sunday with performances by Compania Rafaela Carrasco.