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I liked most of what I saw, though it resembles little associated with traditional flamenco, if you consider the wild, seeming spontaneity of cuadro flamenco as The Norm of format and performance style. Also, a flamenco performance without interruption is a novelty. New to many flamenco performances is the use of percussion, the box, or whatever it is called, I think is native to Latin America, as well as the inverted, open-ended vase like drum with the skin stretched over its bulb like end with its source in Arabic North Africa. This is the first time I have seen a violinist amongst flamenco musicians and also new is the elevation of the musicians stretched across the back of the dancing space, divided amongst three stands. Musicians are usually clustered to one side, or perhaps gathered in the middle so that they are available to the dancer or the ensemble for subtle signals, changes of pace and rhythm.

The lighting seems an attempt to evoke the lore of the flamenco café, rendering the singers’ faces obscure, even when a spot descends upon their heads and shoulders, then shifting to one of two guitarists, or to violinist and percussionist.

Except for soloists, I have never seen such strong, handsome faces in supporting female dancers,or such variety. Despite the unanimity of costume design and colors worn, their strength and attack evoked the haunting pitch and fervor of Garcia Lorca’s haunting tragedies, making visible the relentless quality of his plots, stripped, spare, inevitable due to mores versus passions. In their dancing the interplay of fluidity and percussive force leaped out to engage you. One can comprehend something about the Spanish Civil War from their elegance and strength. They are the first dancers from Spain I have seen to come close to La Tania’s persuasive style. To see them maneuver with black traditional gowns, sweeping, swirling and embracing the ruffles while delivering staccato messages was visual and aural richness.

Then there is guest artist Jose Serrano who is another anomaly, a craggy hunk of a dancer with eloquent hands, leagues away from the small, tidy arrogance of the flamenco exponents from Antonio to Luisillo to Ciro, or even Jose Greco, who schooled American audiences for nearly five decades in the almost paralyzing display of masculine taconeo. Serrano plausibly could be your neighborhood car mechanic or a journeyman construction worker. But commanding he definitely as he expends his energy in a pile hammer display of taconeo.

Serrano’s Seguirya was an utterly remarkable evocation of matador and bull, shifting back and forth between predator and animal, the gestures of the matador’s preliminary sweeps with his cape clearly defined, the circling, the pauses, even the brute pauses of the bull delineated, the bursts of taconeo emphasizing thrust and counter thrust. Serrano created his own bullring in that space, and while doubtless paced and timed, rendered the tradition unforgettably.

Then there is Baras herself, a Spanish gamine, a no-nonsense, can-do personality in a small, tidy, forthright body. Her body ss a descendant of bolero prints or a likely sister to some of Degas’ models at the Paris Opera, hair-severely parted in the middle, securely confined with a neck bun. None of this loss of flowers, comb or loss of sleek silhouette. Her body has a clear line of cultural antecedents and ancestors. She eschews the traditional polka dot flounces, the comb, and nowhere did she or members of the company resort to castanets, though she displayed her mastery of the heavy fringed shawl, another traditional Spanish prop originally wending its way across the Pacific from China via the Pacific. She also eschews traditional fabrics, preferring a jersey-like fluidity in solid tones, embellished with fringe or floating panels which become ruffles in the manner she uses to wrap the fabric around her body.

The Baras delivery is equally tidy, concentrated, remarkably paced, an ebb and flow of stalk and staccato, with an extended use of standing and working leg sharing space with the habitual left-right dizzy sound delivery. This stylistic departure Baras also shares with her dancers, the standing leg temporarily immobile while the working foot describes a partial ronde de jambe as the toe renders one-two, one-two-three, one-two-three-four sound patterns, before moving into one of those lovely promenades, a self-circling whirl of body and fabric. Her solos employ an ebb and flow with a distinctive deliberation, a seeming stretch of pauses I don’t recall before, sometimes filled with the gathering of fabric across her chest as if she clutches someone well-beloved .When she is finished, passion momentarily expended, Baras exhibits a sense of total satisfaction, well-being and generosity, an enthusiastic acknowledgment of colleagues and of the audience.

Ballet Flamenco Sara Baras is a definite stylistic departure in its format and its delivery. It has borrowed structure and ensemble uniformity from ballet ensembles, presentation elsewhere; it is light years away from programmatic format accepted as ‘traditional’ flamenco. The times they definitely are a changing. However, the rhythm, the intensity remains, augmented by a virtuosity catering to contemporary tastes, but not selling out to inferior denominators. It definitely requires adjustment for those of us who remember mid-late 20th century ensembles.

The performance became testimony to the Hindu ideal of the sahrdaya where the intent of the artist is shared with and fulfilled by the audience response, a dialogue of spirit. To say we were mesmerized is mild; it was a standing, almost stomping ovation.