In Seville, a Flamenco Festival With Folk Roots and Some Forward Thinking

SEVILLE, Spain — Displays of ornately decorated fans filled the shop windows; there were porcelain flamenco dancers in their traditional, flouncy dresses, too. In front of the cathedral, two dancers also wearing the long-trained “bata de cola” were performing to tinny recorded music for tourists. Throughout the cobbled streets of the old town, people were handing out flyers. “Real flamenco here!” they said, pointing to a hole-in-the-wall entrance. “Come tonight!”

This is Seville, a city that is flamenco-mad at any time — and never more so than every other September, when the city hosts the Bienal de Flamenco, the oldest festival in Spain dedicated to the dance and music form. This year’s edition, the 20th, ended on Sunday with a lavish outdoor concert by the pianist Dorantes at the harbor, after a monthlong program that featured 60 shows and drew audiences of around 42,000, according to organizers.

The first biennale in 1980 came as a direct reaction to the Franco dictatorship, the festival’s director, Antonio Zoido, said. “Flamenco was one of the things the dictator kidnapped,” Zoido said in an interview Sunday. “Creating the Bienal, opening flamenco to all again, was maybe the first movement the city made as a democratic gesture.”

Flamenco has changed enormously since 1980. But it has always been an evolving art form, from its Gypsy roots, through its popularity in cafes and music halls, to the sudden glamour it acquired in Paris in 1919, when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes staged the flamenco-inspired “Le Tricorne.” But during the Franco era, Zoido said, flamenco retreated from the world stage, becoming “mostly folkloric” and local again.

Festivals like the Bienal have changed that by bringing together artists from all over Spain, with different traditions and ideas. Other dance forms — ballet, contemporary dance, tap — have infiltrated. A public with a huge appetite for flamenco has been born; there are now regular flamenco festivals in London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo. (The Japanese, Zoido said, are particularly passionate about the form.)

The internationalism was evident during the three final days of the Seville festival, which offered five shows that were a big departure from the campfire-and-smoke idea of flamenco. There were plenty of traditional artists performing during the festival, among them Farruquito, María Terremoto and the guitarist Tomatito. But even though several of the performances featured some traditional dress, sequential dance numbers, and accompaniment by guitarists and cantaores (the soulful singers who are stars in their own right), they diverged in notable ways from conventionally austere flamenco recitals.

In “Sin Permiso (Canciones Para el Silencio),” or “Without Permission (Songs for Silence),” dancer Ana Morales displayed gorgeous arching-back fluidity and the rapid-fire footwork known as zapateado, in which the percussive rhythms of the feet mingled and accented the sounds created by the three onstage musicians, who clapped and sang in traditional fashion as she danced alone and with José Manuel Álvarez.

But electronic music played too, and not long into the show, Morales discarded her salmon-colored bata de cola and walked around moodily in a body stocking, before donning Álvarez’s jacket and trousers. Was it a statement about the role of women in flamenco? (Later, she gave the garments back and dressed in a splendid cream gown.)

Eva Yerbabuena, one of flamenco’s best-known names, was similarly unconventional. In “Cuentos de Azúcar” — “Sugar Tales” — she collaborated with two Japanese artists, singer Anna Sato and musician Kaoru Watanabe, as well as with traditional flamenco cantaores and musicians. A circle of metal rings in the center suggested the campfire spotlight in which the flamenco soloist traditionally performs, but Yerbabuena was not the dominant figure. As Sato took center stage, and was joined by singers Alfredo Tejada and Miguel Ortega, the slightly mystifying combination of Japanese songs and flamenco rhythms began to cohere into an enjoyable collision of cultures and styles.

Most theatrical of all was Isabel Bayón, whose “Yo Soy,” or “I Am,” traced a personal history that began with the dancer poised on a high wall, seemingly lost in thought, then segued to a sepia-toned film that showed Bayón in old-fashioned dress, performing a stamping solo while holding a stick like a rifle. Afterward, she reappeared — ballerina-slim and glamorous in a long, caramel satin dress — and offered a virtuoso display of zapateado, her torso rippling and her arms circling with delicacy and power.

At various points in “Yo Soy,” an elderly female voice spoke; it slowly became clear that Bayón was evoking her own history, with singer Sandra Carrasco performing songs that suggested a folkloric past — perhaps she heard them growing up — and an episode in which she enacted the corrections (“Shoulder held like this,” “Your feet placed here”) of a dance teacher.

How effective are these more contemporary theatrical presentations of flamenco?

Innovation is difficult in forms that are defined by specific techniques and conventions. In all these shows, the dancers essentially retained traditional dance forms, even if their music and staging were more experimental. The result was mixed; often, as in Morales’ show, the innovations felt gratuitous. Yerbabuena and Bayón just about pulled it off, but at the expense of some of the intensity and focus — the “duende,” the inspiration that evokes the battle with life, death and art — that flamenco aficionados long for.

But flamenco is a musical form too, and there was plenty of duende in a performance by Rosalía, a 25-year-old Catalan singer, whose debut album, “Los Ángeles,” was all about death. Rosalía has a quivering, slightly childish voice that is a little like Norah Jones, and, singing with a guitarist and two percussionists (who used the flamenco techniques of clapping and finger snapping), she effortlessly evoked drama, pathos, tragedy and joy. Here was the old art of flamenco revived and reborn.