For 25 years now, Miguel Marín, the artistic director of Flamenco Festival New York, has been giving gracious curtain speeches before performances. At New York City Center on Thursday, he spoke of a love story between New York and flamenco going back more than 100 years and of the city as both witness and accomplice in a transformation of tradition.
His annual festival has played an important part in this story, introducing major artists and bringing them back. As usual, this year’s edition sprawls across multiple weeks and theaters of many sizes, encompassing intimate concerts and spectacular productions. And, as is also typical, the heart of the love story is “Gala Flamenca” — a traditional format in which major flamenco dancers do a little something together at the start and the close but mainly express themselves one by one in a string of “here I am” solos with the band.
One customary thrill of this format is the introduction of new blood. The festival’s first gala, in 2003, presented Israel Galván and Rocío Molina, two young iconoclasts who made an immediate impression and would soon grow into leaders of the art. This year, the new guy is Juan Tomás de la Molía, and he’s another wonder. Boyishly charming beneath his beard, he dances with improvisational ease and freedom. He has the power and speed of a virtuoso, but more important, employs inspired musicality and the sound of surprise. He accents neglected areas of the meter and ratchets up tension by occasionally fording against the flow of the rhythm.
Representing lineage is El Farru, scion of a Roma dynasty: grandson of El Farruco, younger brother of Farruquito, whose New York debut was the sensation of the first festival, in 2001. For his solo, Farru wears a red suit and wields a cane, tapping out telegraph signals with it and his feet. He carries his inheritance proudly and comfortably, like a little extra weight around his middle, and attacks with the family ferocity. For a finale, he plays guitar, as at a family party.
Manuel Liñán, who directs the whole program with characteristic simplicity and elegance, is traditional in an untraditional way. In a pink, long-tailed bata de cola dress, twirling a shawl, he is, like many drag acts, performing an exaggerated womanhood — nearly an abstraction of the feminine in flamenco. Underneath a severe and matronly wig, he has a face like Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster and footwork to challenge de la Molía. He rolls his hips and cocks his shoulders in the manner of a flamenco auntie showing that she still has it.
Marín playfully referred to Liñán as “another queen,” because the program already has one in Eva Yerbabuena. Her appearance in the 2002 festival was a revelation to me of an artist with the whole package — an ideal of the art. Here she starts slowly, posing like a tree bent in the wind in blue light before dawn, then becomes her own spiraling storm. She’s almost too good, so assured that some of the drama drains away.
Perhaps for that reason, the climax on Thursday came before Yerbabuena’s closing spot, with the solo of the singer Mara Rey. She is the kind of vocalist who screams her guts out, but she’s also an actress who embodies feeling. When she sings about dying, heaving herself forward and back, you believe her. The ace up her sleeve is that she’s a dancer, too, capable of whipping out percussive footwork with an air of “You didn’t think I could do that, did you?” It’s immensely winning. And so the love story continues.
Gala Flamenca
Through March 1 at New York City Center; nycitycenter.org.
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