Paco Peña Flamenco Dance Company at Town Hall

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Listening to master guitarist Paco Peña in A Compas! last Friday evening felt like time-traveling back into a clear, sheltered space within the turbulent heart of medieval Spain. Peña’s warm, supple and bewitching performance--accompanied by fellow guitarists Paco Arriaga and Rafael Montilla and percussionist Nacho Lopez--provided the only true soul in this one-night-only appearance at Town Hall by the Paco Peña Flamenco Dance Company. Singer Miguel Ortega contributed respectable work, but Inmaculada Rivero’s voice seemed both underpowered and ill-served by the hall’s sound system.

Angel Muñoz, Charo Espino and Ramón Martinez--all skilled and fervent dancers–seemed content to play to the sensibilities of the Broadway-style suburbanites who took the bait and roared approval of every punched-up flourish, hot glance and insinuating grin.

The youthful, handsome and personable Muñoz and Martinez know how to work a crowd. They essentially tell you what you should want and reward you when you clamor for it, thereby anchoring that desire and guaranteeing that you will call for their hustle again and again. They leave no room for any other desire.

I cannot deny the exceptional command of the shape of their dancing and the electrifying speed of their footwork. But Muñoz’s cute-as-a-button mugging and Martinez’s unshaded, wild man act–both overdone, overly self-conscious strategies–failed to move me.

Espino is a queenly swan of a dancer relying too heavily on the sculpting and sometimes off-putting hyper-extension of her upper back, shoulders and arms to make a dramatic impression.

I wanted to see and feel something of the inner reaches of flamenco dance–the unforced stuff, the soul’s genuine, unpredictable response to the music and the twists and turns of life that you can’t miss when Noche Flamenco’s Soledad Barrio, for example, takes the stage.

Running at 2-1/2 hours (including intermission), A Compas! was also a bit of an endurance test. Since Peña clearly had the audience from hello, there was scarcely a need to underscore, double-underscore and triple-underscore the dancers’ glamour. Next time, why not shave off some of that calculated, silly excess?

(c)2007, Eva Yaa Asantewaa