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As fashions for choreography, even the best painters are of restricted use. Dance, for all of its concern with stage compositions, is an artwork of movement; portray, even when it implies motion, is static. But painters can present choreographers with an angle of imaginative and prescient, a method of wanting on the world.
Each part of “Searching for Goya,” this system that Noche Flamenca is performing on the Joyce Theater this week, takes its title from a piece by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. Most sections begin — or begin and end — with a tableau-like staging of the picture in query. The dancing doesn’t precisely deliver it to life. It’s extra that the picture is a body for the flamenco.
“Searching for Goya” is in some ways a typical Noche Flamenca program. It has the corporate’s signature virtues: glorious musicians (particularly the core singers Manuel Gago and Emilio Florido); distinguished visitor dancers (Jesús Helmo, Pablo Fraile and Paula Bolaños); and a climactic solo by its star, Soledad Barrio. The aesthetic is unostentatious, solely the necessities. And all this aligns properly with Goya. It jibes along with his tragic realism.
The present dares to tackle scenes from Goya’s “Disasters of War” sequence, and whereas the choreography (by Barrio, the opposite dancers and the director, Martín Santangelo) lacks Goya’s horrible explicitness, it has its personal expressive energy. When these dancers march like troopers, they accomplish that in frighteningly complicated rhythms. When the sound of an artillery blast or firing-squad salvo simulated by toes struck in opposition to the ground, our bodies jerk with a visceral impact that viewers of Goya can solely think about.
The creepiest theatrical second derives from “Las Camas de la Muerte” (“The Beds of Death”), Goya’s etching of a hooded mourner and lined corpses. The dance represents this with an extended white sheet that bulges as if with our bodies. The mourner strikes alongside her diagonal path and the sheet does, too. It lengthens and slides like a large worm, an limitless physique rely.
But primarily, Goya serves as a jumping-off level. The 4 colliding bulls of “Little Bulls’ Folly” arrange a superb braiding of solos and ensemble bits for Barrio, Helmo, Fraile and Bolaños. One of Goya’s depictions of a matador at work evokes a sublime solo by Fraile. Goya’s “Disparate Puntual (Foolish Precision”), which exhibits a circus performer using a horse on a wire, events a solo of flirty grace by Bolaños, with the remainder of the forged taking part in the gang in grotesque masks that mirror Goya’s squished faces.
Sometimes the picture establishes a temper that the dance sustains. During Helmo’s solo, primarily based on Goya’s “Perro Semihundido,” wherein all however a canine’s head is submerged in a brown mound, Helmo retains wanting up at Florido, who sings down at him from a peak. Helmo’s gaze is the canine’s, and his superbly modulated dance extends the emotion, flamenco-style.
The most potent instance is Barrio’s flip. Her picture is “Two People Looking Into a Luminous Room,” which roughly represents simply that, with a doorway right into a vibrant chamber that’s solely clean white house. Mark London’s lighting is available in low from the left wing. Barrio is between it and the musicians, and he or she bounces backwards and forwards, recoiling from and confronting the sunshine.
There is little in dance as intense as a solo by Barrio. Over and over, she dives in, plunging someplace deep, her articulate toes each pounding a method via and protesting on the identical time. She pits her personal darkish luminosity in opposition to the sunshine from the wing, which appears to signify loss of life, a incontrovertible fact that this artist and firm, like Goya, face unflinchingly. It’s a mercy that “Searching for Goya” ends with the discharge of a cheerful party. After Barrio is finished, all people wants one.
Noche Flamenca
Through Sunday on the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.
