Flamenco’s Leading Lady

BARCELONA, Spain — As the sun set behind distant mountains, flamenco artist Eva Yerbabuena began a rehearsal of her latest full-evening work, “Signs and Wonders,” at an outdoor theater high on a hill overlooking the city. “I took the show’s title from an ancient tradition,” she explained that evening. “As the story goes, to enter a castle, you had to promise to deliver ‘santo y seña.’ That’s what we promise our audiences: signs and wonders.”On Saturday and Sunday, Ballet Flamenco Eva Yerbabuena will bring “Santo y Seña” to City Center in a presentation co-sponsored by World Music Institute and Flamenco Festival USA. It will be the dancer-choreographer’s first appearance in New York since 2005. In the piece, she retraces her steps, as it were, reprising and refreshing highlights from works her company has performed since its debut nine years ago. In addition to reinventing these segments from five shows — including “Eva” (1998), “5 Women 5” (2000) and “The Spindle of Memory” (2006) — she has added new choreography.Now 38, Ms. Yerbabuena stands out for her integrity in a field in which artists often rely on corny formulas as crowd-pleasers, or make amateurish attempts to modernize by using popular music as accompaniment or by embellishing their works with incongruous borrowings from other dance styles.In rehearsal, dressed in sleek black pants and a form-fitting shirt, her long dark hair hanging loose, Ms. Yerbabuena stomped on an onstage wooden platform to see if the sound would carry to the highest seats in the bleachers. Satisfied with the result, she signaled to her husband, the guitarist Paco Jarana, and his fellow musicians, to begin. A singer raised his husky voice in raw-throated fervor. The guitars joined him. Slowly lifting her arms, Ms. Yerbabuena rolled her hips from side to side, tapping her feet softly to the insistent chords.Other dancers entered clapping their hands and formed a semicircle around her. She danced as if driven by an unseen force, one moment fiery, the next solemn, seeming to embody lust, jealousy, and sorrow alternately with each sensual move. More than an hour later, her shirt wet with sweat and her hair in disarray, she called out, “Gracias, gracias,” and headed backstage.She settled after the rehearsal at her dressing table, which was bare but for her makeup case, a Hershey bar, and a bouquet of red roses. “No matter what I choreograph,” she said, “I think in terms of having a conversation with my audience. Emotion is so central to flamenco that not to touch people would be a failure.”Others, too, have remarked on this aspect of Ms. Yerbabuena’s appeal. “Eva has the power to move all people,” the director of Flamenco Festival Inc., Miguel Marin, said. “It comes from her energy. She totally connects with her own emotions and, thus, with ours.” After a performance in 2002, the New Yorker critic Joan Acocella wrote: “She seemed to touch on every facet of human experience. No one else in the festival got the ovation she did. The spectators jumped to their feet, screaming, and they stayed and stayed, letting other people get the taxicabs.”Ms. Yerbabuena creates highly individualistic pieces, such as “5 Women 5,” in a style influenced by modern dance, and she also choreographs productions that faithfully interpret traditional flamenco.Her consuming belief in the power of flamenco grows out of her childhood in southern Spain, where she studied with many of the art form’s greatest performers; she danced with two prominent companies, Rafael Aguilar and Paco Moyano, before establishing her own. Since then, she has received every major Spanish dance award and performed at home, elsewhere in Europe, and in Asia, South America, and North America. Today, she lives near Seville with her husband and teenage daughter.Ms. Yerbabuena said she begins every show with an image in mind. For “Signs and Wonders,” she pictured herself sitting onstage in a small pool of light. That, in fact, is how the work opens — with her seated in a chair illuminated by a single spotlight, preparing for a trip through flamenco. “It resembles a journey through life,” she said, “for we perform a dance for almost every human emotion.”Improvisation is as fundamental to flamenco as it is to jazz. No matter how much flamenco choreographers plan their shows, their productions will suffer if a large part does not include spontaneous responses to the music and the mood of the moment. “Your improvisation depends on your state of mind,” Ms. Yerbabuena said, “but it doesn’t solely depend on you. You’re with musicians and other dancers, and they’re going to help you maintain a balance between your dance, their dances, and the music. The interplay among the performers is what makes flamenco such an emotional and exciting experience. You really don’t know what’s going to happen.”Stopping by his wife’s dressing room to suggest a few adjustments to the show, Mr. Jarana offered his own take on the couple’s working method. “Sometimes Eva has the first idea, and other times it’s me,” he said. “But as soon as we decide on the concept, I start the music, always aiming for coherence between the theme and the music. We have been sharing ideas for many years. The results come in stages — a bit of this, then a bit of that — and we keep going to see what we get. We’re very in tune with one another.”As the evening’s performance grew closer, Ms. Yerbabuena began removing sumptuous red, black, and white gowns from a closet. She laid delicately embroidered shawls across a chair, then started arranging her hair. “Flamenco is the best vehicle for me to express myself,” she said. “It’s a way of life and the culture of a people. For all our modernization in Spain, it’s still an essential aspect of Spanish life. What means the most to me is that when I step onstage, I feel the greatest sense of freedom. I only know freedom through flamenco.”A short while later, she appeared onstage beautifully dressed, bathed in a single light. A hush fell over the theater, and the moon emerged from behind a cloud. As if possessed, she rose to her feet. “Olé!” shouted one audience member, then another and another. The conversation had begun.

Flamenco’s Leading Lady

Flamenco’s Leading Lady

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