An intimate conversation between one dancer and 1,833 audience members may seem impossible. But Eva Yerbabuena, with her swishing skirts and syncopations, promises just this.
Tonight and Thursday, UCLA Live hosts Ballet Flamenco Eva Yerbabuena. Choreographer and lead dancer Yerbabuena is an award-winning flamenco dancer who continually redefines the cult genre. Her performance forms part of the annual Flamenco Festival, in its 10th year at Royce Hall.
“What I intend is to deliver the most personal performance possible,” said Yerbabuena. “Flamenco is my native language and the ideal medium for expressing myself.”
This year’s performance, “Santo y Seña” (“Signs and Wonders”), promises to deliver the female soloist’s traditional magnetism by casting a retrospective glance over the company’s 10-year-old repertoire.
The performance showcases flamenco’s Andalusian roots, as well as compiling pivotal aspects of Yerbabuena’s previous work.
“(Yerbabuena) in this show really wanted to highlight her side as a bailaora,” said Miguel Marin, the festival’s director. “In other shows we saw her more as a choreographer.”
The bailaora is a spectral stage figure who reconstructs her stories in every performance and thrives from interaction with her audience, said flamenco dancer Liliana de León, a world arts and cultures professor and choreographer and director of “de LiRitmo” a flamenco dance company based in the United States.
“A bailaora can devour you emotionally, and at the same time, she feeds your soul while she is performing onstage,” de León said. “As bailaoras we want to make sure that we are not known for how we arrange dancers on stage, but perhaps (Eva) wants to be known for how she performs her particular compositions.”
At traditional venues such as “tablaos,” which are inns with small stages, the audience and performers’ position at eye-level facilitates the intimacy of their relationship. Thus, the large capacity of Royce Hall poses a challenge to the bailaora’s delivery.
“The flamenco bailaora has been evolving because we have larger spaces to perform in and larger audiences to please and interweave our stories,” de León said. “I believe that La Yerbabuena is one of the few soloists that can take a larger audience through a complete journey.
“There could be 800 people watching, and it will feel like an intimate reach across the proscenium, with every person sitting down feeling … that they are in a duet with the person on stage.”
Regardless of venue size, appreciation of flamenco does not require fluency in its terms, as each spectator can tune into a performance at his or her own level.
“If you’re a beginning dancer, (Yerbabuena’s) hands or her arms would be the thing that would mesmerize you for two hours.” de León said. “If you are an advanced dancer or performer, you will be watching her shoulders and her ribs and her hips, because she has the most unique signature moves within her torso.”
With such an interactive relationship between audience and dancers, it seems that merely watching flamenco is enough to spread its contagion. Yerbabuena herself found this to be true at a young age.
“I had this passion from the age of 12, since I had the opportunity to enjoy flamenco live at a festival,” Yerbabuena said.
Alice Li, a first-year physiological sciences and psychology student, has also caught on to the excitement of live flamenco.
“I’ve seen little clips of flamenco, (but) I don’t remember a full performance,” she said. “The flamenco impressions I get are probably from the mass-media. … One time they showed this car advertisement, a red car and they compared it to a flamenco dancer. The flamenco dancer was dancing and the car was driving super fast.”
It is this visceral impression of flamenco, the mongrel dance form derived from the Moorish and Gypsy margins of Spanish society that appeals to unassuming audiences.
“It’s got spice ““ it adds flavor to a person’s life,” Li said.