Eva Yerbabuena with Ballet Eva Yerbabuena

Eva Yerbabuena with Ballet Eva Yerbabuena
Flamenco Festival USA

City Center, New York, NY

January 29, 2005

Reviewed by Valerie Gladstone

On the darkened stage, a spotlight shines down on flamenco dancer Eva Yerbabuena, who sits listening to a gramophone playing scratchy old recordings of flamenco songs. Inspired by the music, she rises slowly from her chair and begins to dance, her arms arching above her head and her feet beginning quiet but insistent tapping. Small and stocky, and looking older than her 34 years in an unflattering dark dress, she rescues this corny introduction to Eve, an exploration of different flamenco song forms, with the sinuous twists and turns of her body and grace of her hands.

Two years ago, when Yerbabuena presented the same full-evening work, she gave herself fully to the performance, dancing the lyrical alegrías and passionate soleá with achingly beautiful eloquence. But this time she danced far less and without passion or conviction. In the stiff “Torre de la Vela,” she wore a tight white dress with a very long train—not an unusual outfit for traditional flamenco, but one that ill suited her. She looked encumbered, continually rearranging the train and moving awkwardly.

Except for one commanding solo in the second half of the two-hour program, Yerbabuena seemed preoccupied and distant from the material, which couldn’t be more detrimental to this soulful art. When she is “on,” there is no one like her dancing flamenco today. She curls and snakes her body to the complex rhythms and becomes one with the music, so emotionally transparent that she can bring audiences to tears. But this performance suggests that she requires someone to guide her; increasingly she comes across as a narcissist, less interested in probing the depths of her material than inventing self-glorifying narratives.

Yerbabuena also choreographed the dances for her company, faring far better with the men, a vigorous group, than the women (who, like Yerbabuena, wore surprisingly drab costumes throughout the program). At one point they sported fans, waving them in semaphores and grinning coquettishly. Even in Las Vegas such goings-on might be thought corny. She has fallen into the same trap as her colleagues—María Pagés, Joaquín Cortés, and others—who, tired of performing the traditional dances in traditional ways, decide to modernize them. Though this is not a bad idea, they don’t have the sophistication to carry off their concepts and the results often look sophomoric or amateurish. Like jazz standards, the basic flamenco dance forms can be successfully reinterpreted over and over again, if an artist is willing to do the hard work and skip the tricks.