Eva Yerbabuena

Eva Yerbabuena and her Ballet Flamenco company opened the London Flamenco Festival at Sadler's Wells with three performances of her latest production, El Huso de la Memoria (The Spindle of Memory). A native of Granada, despite having been born in Frankfurt, La Yerbabuena is one of the leading flamenco dancers of her generation. Her new production blends traditional flamenco with modern dance styles to create a rather abstract, but captivating performance. It consists of a number of precisely choreographed numbers with different combinations of male and female dancers, with a focus on time, symmetry and rhythmic repetition subtly inspired by West Side Story. These numbers are interspersed with more free-flowing interludes from dancer Aida Badía, performing to saetas, unaccompanied prayers originating in the Easter processions. Eva Yerbabuena dances four numbers, the third of which is by far the highlight of the show, and danced to a soleá (an improvised combination of three- or four-verse stanzas over a 12-beat metre). The musical accompaniment is provided by four male singers, two guitars, flute/soprano saxophone, and percussion.

This type of more artsy, large-production performance will probably not appeal so much to those preferring the more intimate, low-key setting of traditional flamenco haunts, but it's a fair compromise to see the more established dancers who have graduated from the tablao. Of course, I wanted to see Isabel Bayón on Wednesday, but it's sold out already. The clip below is from one of Yerbabuena's performances at the 2006 Bienal de Flamenco in Seville, with singer Miguel Poveda, courtesy of traza