E-Mail This Article to a Friend Tepid flames and a glow The Four Elements and Flamenco de cámara at the Majestic BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

We all have our generic images of flamenco — the sinuous woman in the extravagant dress, the keening singer and thrumming guitars — but as World Music’s sixth Flamenco Festival demonstrated last weekend at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, flamenco is terrifically adaptable. Without losing its traditional identity, it allows for an extraordinary range of individual talent and oddness. As an essentially soloistic medium, flamenco can accommodate performers of all shapes and ages, it can reflect the present as well as the past. It thrives in dim cafés and concert halls. It can be the business venture of a pick-up company or the life work of a family dynasty. It can look like a ballet or a spelling bee.

I wouldn’t draw the line at theatricalized flamenco, but some schemes are better than others. Flamenco is just about the most elemental of theatrical dance genres; it doesn’t need arrows and neon signs to show us how earthy and fiery it is, so there was something excessive about basing a flamenco show on the earth-air-fire-water concept. In the evening-length The Four Elements, the real article got swathed in layers of theatrical outerwear.

The theme itself is such a cliché, it’s hard to see how any new light could be shed on it, but I guess the producers’ idea was to package a coalition of four very different artists as a touring attraction. All four choreographed their own solos, and apart from the metaphoric subtitles, they did deliver a range of flamenco styles.

Rocío Molina (water), in a tight-fitting dark blue dress with a heavy ruffly train (more like an ice floe than a foamy wave), specialized in looping, spiraling turns and quick, small changes of direction. She angled her arms around her head, popping one joint at a time, created fast pattering sounds with her feet, and described little whirlpools around herself with renversé turns.

As you’d expect, Alejandro Granados (earth) did a lot of stamping, even two-footed jumping into the ground. Rugged as an old oak tree, Granados wore a shapeless brown suit, and later, when he did a dance of fast, tight-to-the-body footwork, you wouldn’t have thought someone so rooted to the ground could also suggest a storm of dry leaves.

Carlos Rodríguez (air) gestured with his arms, shoulders, head, hips, and legs. He incorporated not just modern-dance lunges and attitudes but little jazzy flounces and broad, mugging appeals to the audience. Building up speed, he let loose a surge of rhythm, his head tossing, his arms pumping like pistons.

Carmen Cortés (fire) wore a red dress made almost entirely of fringe, with a yellow fringe underskirt. Keeping her movement contained in the center body, she worked up gradually to a stamping, sliding interlude. She did some whirling circles, but I thought she’d create more incendiary visual effects with that fringe.

Before any of these dance inventions could emerge, there was a lot of modern-dance melodrama to be got through. Overall staging for the show was credited to Jacqulyn Buglisi, a former principal dancer with Martha Graham who now choreographs her own work.

The show opens with the dancers in black and sitting on chairs in a close circle. A seven-man ensemble plays quietly in the background as the dancers seem to meditate, patting the rhythm on their thighs and piercing the air in unison with desperate-looking gestures. The idea is that they’re these ordinary folks with passion bottled up inside them, they just need the right costumes and music to release it. The four solo dances that follow seem to arise out of intense but cryptic encounters. As one dancer finishes and another enters, they act out little character studies. One is distraught and can’t be consoled. One desires another; he rejects her. They handle emblematic props: a conch shell filled with water, a handful of sand.

For décor, lighting designer Clifton Taylor contributed a series of interesting, element-appropriate projections, soft-edged Rothko-esque swatches of color, with bits of filmed nature set inside some of them — clouds crossing the sky, sea grass waving in the current. The music (directed by Gerardo Núñez) was also purposely atmospheric. Besides the traditional flamenco guitars and singing, there was a modern-jazz saxophone (Perico Sambeat) playing for one section. Native American chants and drumming introduced another. With the addition of the drummer (Nacho Arimani) and the sax player, the ensemble for The Four Elements followed traditional flamenco practice — dancers, guitars, and singers — but it seemed to me that the insistent production concept diminished their talents.

For Flamenco de cámara ("Chamber Flamenco"), the size of the group was a little smaller, but somehow the show had a bigger scope. This evening was in essence a solo recital for a singer, a dancer, two guitarists, and two women who did the percussive clapping. The singer was, untraditionally, a woman, Mayte Martín, who directed the chamber company with dancer Belén Maya. They began the evening with a dialogue. Maya, in a long-sleeved white gown with a train, circled around Martín, who stood very still, dressed in a man’s jacket, pants, black shirt. As she sang, she seemed to be drawing the dancer to her, and Maya, attracted but reserved, didn’t quite succumb.

Who were these two characters, and what was their relationship? The question arose immediately for me. I don’t know whether a translation of the Spanish lyrics would have clarified the situation, but the uncertainty made the whole performance fascinating. I rejected the explanation that they were lesbian lovers as too obvious, but Martín’s dual identity was both a challenge and a stretch.

The male singer in traditional flamenco tells a story, the dancer’s story, I think. In her dance, she relives it, relating to him sometimes as if she could prevent it from happening. Martín seemed to represent something more than the dancer’s voice — a friend, a mother perhaps, but a sympathetic character in any case, not the power figure that a male singer always represents. Yet she sang a man’s part.

In the three songs and three dances that followed, Martín evinced a vocal capacity that male singers can’t manage. Their falsetto passages suited her voice without strain; she could damp down to a whisper, glide over difficult melismas, and rise to a clamorous forte with an edge of menace. I know people appreciate the anguish and the rawness of traditional flamenco singing, but Martín achieved emotion with a more subtle musicality.

As the evening progressed, Maya showed her own versatility. Tientos antiguos was a dance of short bursts of footwork, often in syncopated phrases, with lots of decorative arm movements. She and the guitarists made vigorous punctuating comments on Martín’s vocal line. In the Alegrías section, she worked up big crescendi of steps and intricate manipulations of the voluminous train on her yellow gown. At one point, she hopped in a circle with the great mound of fabric draped on her outstretched leg. By the end, she was stamping and whirling so fast, the train surrounded her feet.

The last dance was mysterious, dark. Maya, in a plain gray long dress with black fringe on the sleeves, began kneeling on the floor in a shaft of light. Martín’s voice had an electronic echo now, and Maya was drawn to it, but still she held back. My question about who they were nudged me again. This time I thought maybe Martín was Death calling. For a third time, Maya knelt; then she stood as the lights went out. Perhaps she’d seen a vision.

There wasn’t any literal reason such dramatic thoughts should have come to mind. The performance wasn’t fitted out with suggestions or acting clues. It simply relied on the meeting of these two gifted women, one embodying an ambiguous sexuality and the other enacting a codified femininity, to subvert our expectations.

The full-house audiences loved both flamenco shows I attended. As an encore, both companies offered an informal reprise. Lined up across the front of the stage, the performers accompanied one another as the musicians took a turn at dancing. This is always the moment in a flamenco show when the formal structures break down and the audience glimpses the "real" performers as the troupers they are.

The guitarists for Martín and Maya, Juan Ramón Caro and José Luis Montón, and the women who clapped in rhythm, Sara Berrero and Susana Medina, were all pretty convincing. Only the violinist (Olvido Lanza) didn’t have a go at dancing. The Four Elements musicians looked as if they’d feel more comfortable in a rock club, and they danced that way too.