La Tania

The Boston Phoenix
September 25 - October 2, 1997

[Dance Reviews]

Neo-flamenco

La Tania push the envelope

by Marcia B. Siegel
Modernization can preserve performing-arts traditions, paradoxical as that idea may seem. Traditional dance forms are always adapting to the contemporary life around them, unconsciously or calculatedly, in refined or blatant ways -- and flamenco is especially volatile because its native habitat is the nightclub. As vernacular entertainers, flamenco performers have to create personas and styles that distinguish them from their rivals. Family fiefdoms and cultlike followers do as much as the dance itself to keep flamenco alive. The question is how far you can push the boundaries before you abandon flamenco territory.
The California-based La Tania Flamenco troupe, which opened the Dance Umbrella season at the Emerson Majestic last weekend, is poised on an eclectic borderline. Many of its innovations were tasteful and not too distracting. Overall, though, I felt the dance took second place to the theatrical devices that were meant to enhance it.
Artistic director La Tania and her partner, Andrés Marin, were both masters of flamenco technique: the changing rhythms that entice you in, then throw you off base with syncopation; the rapid-fire footwork that can spatter like rain or strike like a thunderclap. It seemed to me they had less command of the intensities in between, and of the distinctions among the sounds made with different parts of the foot. But the miking and the rather soft surface of the stage floor might have flattened out these subtleties. Both dancers drew attention more consistently to their upper bodies, using gestural ideas from ballet, modern dance, show biz, and an expansion of flamenco's own lexicon.
Each number on the program, which featured dance solos and duets as well as specialties for the singers and guitarists, emerged suspensefully from a darkened space. The dancers materialized in shafts of white light or a gradual dawn. Almost every dance worked the audience up through a series of higher and higher excitements to a sudden cutoff. Marin at this point would drop his dancing attitude and saunter off, staring contemptuously at the audience, which in turn would rise to the bait with more applause.
Marin fashioned himself as an oddball. As if the bolero, cummerbund, and frilled shirt of traditional flamenco were signs of sissiness, he wore black velour tights with various skintight muscle shirts; in one solo he went topless. His dancing was constantly embellished with swooping, assertive gestures. He curled his wrists with splayed palms, exaggerating the flamenco woman's tightly coiling hands. He seemed unable to hold in his tempestuous energy, so his most theatrical gestures would end, then drain off into a new move before the resolution was definite. He didn't seem to have any particular focus for these histrionics except showing off to the audience. In the end, he reminded me of the alluring but slightly epicene Michael Flatley, the iconic star of Lord of the Dance.
La Tania also played up the dramatics with flamboyant gestures and emotive stalkings around the space. She too made revisions on the costume. In one piece she wore a simple black satin haltertop gown with the ruffled train lined in white, and she wrapped or framed herself in a white shawl that was mostly fringe. In another piece it was ankle-length black velvet with a swag of black lace trailing asymmetrically over the skirt.
She had no shame about showing her ankles, and in the most virtuosic passages she'd lift her skirts, sometimes up to the thigh, not provocatively but with a practical air, as if to get them out of the way. I liked her most in the last, Gypsy-like piece, Herencia Mora, when she seemed to let the footwork convey all her passion and pride.
Although flamenco is essentially a rhythm dance, La Tania Flamenco wants us to see the dance as well as feel it. Sometimes this distracted me, and sometimes it overrode the rhythm entirely. In their duet Por la Verea, La Tania wore a plain red Victorian dress, and Marin, still jacketless and collarless, also had a red top. They enacted a standard man-woman battle, stomping at each other angrily, facing off with upraised arm, pivoting away to leave, arrested by second thoughts. It could have been Alvin Ailey or a film by Carlos Saura.