Flamenco Ole!

Finally, having noted what we did get, I should mention what was missing. There was no flamenco singer at all, and therefore the stylized heartbreak, the smoldering eroticism, and the interplay with the dancer that the singer brings to a flamencoperformance were totally absent. As a result, there was absolutely nothing to stir the heart. Instead we had Lopez, six female dancers, and occasionally Montero flouncing around the stage, striking poses.

Now for the grim details. Lorca's somber tragedy, The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), presents a scorching critique of what the playwright regarded as an outworn moral code in which family honor is regarded as the highest value of all, at theexpense of self-fulfillment of the individual. In the play, the matriarch Bernarda has decreed an eight-year period of mourning for her five daughters in honor of her recently deceased husband. The father's will is read: most of the estate will passto the eldest daughter, Angustias, who can now contemplate marriage with her suitor, Pepe el Romano. Pepe, however, has eyes for Angustias' younger sister Adela, who returns his feelings. When their love is discovered, one of the sisters shoots Pepeand Adela kills herself, and the house of Alba destroys itself.

It is hard to know what might have impelled Montero to believe that this play was an appropriate vehicle for adaptation to dance of any kind, especially flamenco, since his part, that of Pepe, offers little opportunity for him to dance (and hecertainly is no actor). Indeed his version offered a telling illustration of the limitations of dance as a means of telling a story. In the play Adela charges her mother with making the lives of her and her sisters a living hell in order to upholdthe honor of the Alba family, and the tyrannical Bernarda answers sharply in kind, about ungrateful daughters, etc. In the dance, neither of them can do anything but stamp her foot a lot, which turns the fierce collision of the generations into apouting contest.

If Lopez insists on offering work of this kind to the public, at least she should not call it flamenco, which has a long and glorious tradition of its own.

— Robert Ackerman