Eva Yerbabuena, one of flamenco’s best, has been leading her company for 26 years, and still she is full of surprises. In her latest piece, Yerbagüena, she starts centre stage, musicians crowded around her, four singers goading her on with insistent hand-claps – a conventional flamenco setup. But in the next scene suddenly there’s a man in a dress dragging her prone body along the floor, her long black leatherette train dragging, looking like a mermaid in an oil spill, and her percussionist has swapped his cajón for a drum kit and laptop.
This clash of old and new, traditional and progressive, extrovert and introvert is all part of the game of contrasts in Yerbagüena, a piece subtitled Oscuro Brilliante (“Bright Dark”). It’s an interesting tension, even if where she’s taking us with it is not clear. Yerbabuena’s mercurial dancing can be fierce, determined, self-possessed, cool, muted; her body quivers into life, curls into serpentine shapes or strikes a stark pose. Her costume designer is channelling goth-glam with dramatic black dresses: one with frills and sharp shoulders, another with a PVC fishtail that looks metallic, light bouncing off its shiny surface. But then she sweeps a richly coloured, fringed manton (traditional shawl) around her shoulders in another culture clash.
Coincidentally, the dancer Rocío Molina, who opened this year’s Flamenco festival (the two-week fiesta this show belongs to), also performed a stripped-back, black-clad performance. But there’s a noticeable difference between the two performances. Whereas every beat of Molina’s feet rang out clearly into the auditorium, Yerbabuena’s virtuoso footwork is sometimes lost amid the rousing momentum of the music. Not that you’d want to lose that spirit: this show really flies when they all let rip at the finale in tense crescendos that ultimately erupt, especially the singer Antonio Gómez “El Turry”, roaring out his soul in pained confrontation.
Please, is it too much to ask to have some English surtitles? When this much passion goes into the singing, it feels important to know what they’re saying. Flamenco may work at a level of human emotion that goes beyond words, but Yerbabuena is a thinking artist too, so why leave us in the dark?
• The Flamenco festival is at Sadler’s Wells, London, until 15 June
