“Cuidado!,” someone in the audience at the Joyce Theater yelled on Tuesday.
It was opening night of Noche Flamenca’s new show, “Legacy of Our Dreams,” and the company’s star, Soledad Barrio, was finishing her climactic solo. Turning in the direction of dimming light from one of the wings, she was nearing the edge of the slightly raised dance platform. The voice in the audience was warning her to be careful.
Too late. She fell into the wing.
It’s a measure of Barrio’s total commitment to her art that this accident looked nearly intentional, a fitting culmination to her solo’s descent into despair. To watch Barrio perform a Solea — the flamenco form that, like her first name, means “solitude” — is always to be a little concerned for her safety, at least emotionally, such is the slow-ratcheting, soul-baring intensity of her dancing.
But if the fall was artistically consistent, it was also concerning. Barrio is 60. When she returned to the stage during the ensemble finale, apparently uninjured, it was a relief. (A company representative said later that she wasn’t hurt.)
Barrio won’t have to sit out the rest of Noche Flamenca’s Joyce run, but what is most remarkable about the company’s latest production is how little it would change if she did. It would lose its boiling point and star turn, but apart from the opening and closing group numbers, that solo is Barrio’s only appearance. As a close follower of the company for decades, I can’t remember a show less focused on her.
“Legacy of Our Dreams” doesn’t really have a clear focus. Press materials suggested that it would be an extension of last year’s “Searching for Goya,” inspired by the Spanish painter, but there’s no mention of him in the program, and unlike the earlier show, the titles of the numbers don’t obviously correspond to his works.
What remains as spillover is an imagistic approach. Paula Bolaños’s solo, “Destiny,” begins with her in a chair on one side of the stage, while on the other sits Manuel Gago, one of the company’s excellent longtime vocalists, shrouded in gray fabric. Throughout the solo, Bolaños, a petite dancer of knifelike precision, picks up the fabric, puts it over her shoulder and stretches it to her side of the stage and back a few times.
The fabric emphasizes her connection to Gago, as well as her uncommonly fluid way of traveling sideways while executing complex footwork. The function of the imagery for Jesús Helmo’s solo, “The End,” is less apparent. As Helmo dances, a black panel like a standing mirror falls, revealing the man who was holding it; after a bit, the man stands it back up.
The prop doesn’t contribute much meaning to Helmo’s quiet grace, but he, like Bolaños, contributes much to the show. So does David Nieto, a modest, mustachioed dancer who electrifies his beautiful technique with small controlled explosions and finishes his solo with a cicada buzz of castanets.
The absence of Barrio makes more room for these talented soloists and elegant choreography (by the dancers and Martín Santangelo, the company’s director) for a female ensemble of four. Helmo and Nieto share a duet titled “Matrimonio” (“Marriage”) that nicely balances suggestions of romance (embraces, a near kiss) with formal abstraction (90-degree pivots, back-to-back versus side-by-side, call and response).
Santangelo adeptly arranges all this with simple staging, alternating between overlapping transitions and blackouts, so that “Legacy of Our Dreams” feels shorter than its 80-minute duration. Barrio is still the standout — no other dancer in the production matches her ability to pull you along as she takes her time saying something of the greatest urgency. But more than usual for Noche Flamenca, the company carries the show.
Noche Flamenca
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.
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