There is a lot of flamenco these days in New York, but there is very little pure, unadorned flamenco. Most of what is billed as flamenco takes place at large, formal spaces like City Center or the Joyce Theater, where microphones pick up the clicking of shoes and the strumming of guitars. Seeing flamenco in such places is like seeing jazz at Lincoln Center – you lose the cramped seating and the clink of plates, the rapport between the performers and the room.

Theater 80, where the Madrid-based Noche Flamenca is now appearing, is no nightclub, but it is the kind of intimate, low-rent, pleasantly faded place that foments associations. Maybe the guitarist playing in the corner isn’t sitting by the campfire, but he has sat by the fire enough in his life that he can bring that quality with him. At Theater 80, there are no microphones. You are close enough to see the subtle changes in a dancer’s face and feel the warm camaraderie between the performers. If you sit in the front rows, you might get hit by the sweat flying off a dancer’s hair. There are people in the crowd calling out “Ole!” and stamping their feet. This may be as close to authentic flamenco as you can get in New York nowadays.

Noche Flamenca is a troupe with a very specific formula. The incomparably regal Soledad Barrio, now 40, is the star. (Could you invent a better name for a flamenco diva?) Her husband, Martin Santangelo, is the producer, and he usually hires two male dancers – one older, one younger – to be in his wife’s show, but no female dancers. They perform, usually, an alegria, a tango, a solea, and a few other numbers. Accompanying them is a band made up of gypsy singers and guitarists who form a kind of extended family onstage, urging the dancers on with their cries and frank murmurs of delight.

Typically the stage is dim and bare except for a few chairs, and the atmosphere is that of a cafe after hours, when most of the customers have gone home. The guitars are alternately mournful and defiant.The costumes are flamboyant and tight – tight enough to show off the little pads of flesh on thighs and stomachs. There are no Vegas-style hard-bodies in Noche Flamenca, just the kind of performers who have a hearty meal after the show.

There are flamenco divas whose hauteur rubs you the wrong way, but you can’t help but like the sturdy Soledad, who wears a single flower in her severe chignon. She exudes not arrogance but absolute seriousness. There is an earnest, fierce look in her flinty eye, and she almost never smiles. This grave-faced diva earns her top billing, every single night.

Ms. Barrio is fleet-footed and marvelously defiant in her rapid-fire footwork.But she is even more compelling when she floats across the floor, arching her back and turning her voluptuous arms and wrists as if she were carving out sinuous shapes in the air.Virtuosic in a choreographed duet with Alejandro Granados, dazzling in group numbers, she struck a piercing note in her solo, a siguiriya (dance of grief).

Facing her wailing singers, Ms. Barrio bent her supple back in abject grief. Even their raw cries, she seemed to say, could not reach the depths of her bitterness. At times she seemed to defy her grief,slapping her thigh and punching the floor with her feet as if to stamp out the pain. But then she would stop and drag a toe lightly across the floor, sketching out her suffering with her curving torso and eloquent arms. Once she raised an arm toward the sky, a gesture that plainly said “Why?” As the music faded and the lights dimmed, she turned to the singers, as if about to seek comfort, then turned away – turned to them, then turned away again.

While Ms. Barrio has the kind of stage presence that makes her band sit up straight, the younger male dancer, Juan Ogalla, possesses a sly smile that makes musicians laugh. Mr. Ogalla’s mastery over his body allowed him to tease the crowd before delivering his knockout punches: fast and furious zapateados. Mr. Granados’s solo, by contrast, had the patina of his age – galloping steps punctuated by proud poses and big, flailing leaps that may have once looked more precise, but never more bold.

At the end of Noche Flamenca, however, it’s Ms. Barrio you remember: how her sharp head-jerks freeze a moment in time, how she fascinates you with a single upraised, undulating wrist. Unafraid of her own violence, unafraid of her own trembling, she remains the bona fide star of this breathtakingly intimate show.

Until July 30 (80 St. Mark’s Place, between First and Second Avenues, 212-352-3101).