A solitary conversation

Although she has spoken of her performances as conversations with the audience, flamenco diva Eva Yerbabuena remained an isolated figure at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Wednesday, deeply immersed in a private relationship with the music.

At the beginning of her “Santo y Sena” (Signs and Wonders) program, she appeared under a hanging lightbulb, wearing a short black jacket over a long gray ruffled dress. Suddenly lunging forward, she sat on a stool, her hands spread across her thighs, listening intently.

The instant a male began singing offstage, Yerbabuena flung her arms out and up, rose and began a series of twisty positional changes, her hands curling slowly, deliberately, above and in front of her, as if they had a life of their own. When singer Enrique Soto entered at the left, her palm-up gesture seemed to beg him to come no closer and, most of all, persuade him that the pain of his song overwhelmed her. It was one of the few moments of overt contact with anyone during the unbroken 80-minute program, a showcase for an artist of remarkable expressive powers.

With its four male dancers, four singers and four musicians (guitars, percussion, woodwinds), the Yerbabuena company supplemented her dancing with other facets of flamenco artistry. But sound problems -- interference early on, imbalances later -- and a lighting plot that kept all the dancers in a black hole compromised everyone’s effectiveness.

“Life is illuminated by light but intensified by darkness” read a program note, so the prevailing dimness was clearly intentional. But it ceased to be wearying only when the costumes glowed: Yerbabuena’s fringed white dress, accented in pink, for example, in her solo “Espumas del Recuerdo.” Here the enormous ruffled train that she kicked behind her and the fringed pink shawl that she swung overhead created a kind of liquid whirlwind or vortex in which she danced proudly, forcefully -- authoritative and even glamorous.

In tightly fitted red and black for “Quiero y No Quiero,” she emphasized supple shoulder and hip action as well as choreographic symmetries: arm swings to the left and then to the right, up and then back, and so on. She also ventured an extended passage of intricate heel work, executed in place, but through all the bold changes of impetus managed to suggest that she was lost in a dream and that we were seeing only a part of what she was experiencing.

In “Cadencia,” she wore an opalescent sepia gown -- its color largely neutralized under yellow light -- and drifted slowly across the stage as if remembering feelings and music from sometime in the past. Touching her throat, barely moving, she stayed far away until abruptly shifting into the here and now, becoming supremely lusty and vibrant as all the singers (Soto, Pepe de Pura, Jeomo Segura and Jose Valencia) surrounded her and followed her offstage.

A distinctive and often mysterious sensibility dominated all four solos, and though her technique proved faultless, Yerbabuena rarely showcased it for long, preferring to draw the audience into what she was feeling. Her choreography for the men featured the same dramatic changes of stance seen in her solos but stressed unison movement over individual expression.

In “A Las Cinco de la Tarde,” Mariano Bernal and Eduardo Guerrero wore red while Alejandro Rodriguez and Juan Manuel Zurano wore red and brown, and their changing groupings in twos and fours, plus the contrast of assaultive heel work with utter silence, made this the sharpest, most developed of the three male showpieces. What’s more, the flute of Ignacio Vidaechea accented the guitar playing of Manuel de la Luz and Paco Jarana (the company music director and Yerbabuena’s husband), adding to the excitement.

The choreography for another quartet seemed little more than an afterthought, distinctive mostly for the artful drumming of Raul Dominguez. A Bernal-Guerrero-Rodriguez playoff in dark suits did offer tantalizing glimpses of their solo prowess, but nothing much else.

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lewis.segal@latimes.com