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“Flamenco by numbers”, sniffed the FT when the young Sara Baras made one of her early appearances at Sadler’s Wells. And yet the flamenco superstar has been a regular visitor for more than a quarter of a century and was back again on Tuesday, performing as part of London’s annual two-week Flamenco Festival curated by Miguel Marin.
Vuela (“Fly”) is a long show — two hours, no interval — in which the virtuoso numbers are supplemented by five musicians, two singers, a male soloist (Daniel Saltares) and a chorus line of six smiling señoritas. Like our first glimpse of Baras back in 1999, the slick production often felt stagy and over-rehearsed but the 54-year-old star loosened up for the enjoyable final section and her own magnificent skills saved the evening from becoming an outsized floorshow.
The piece is divided into four sections: “Wood”, “Sea”, “Death” and “Fly”, with Baras’s exhausting solos interlarded with leisurely ensembles and musical interludes. The first big number during “Wood” features Saltares and the six chorines in lockstep, banging their bastónes (canes) against the heavily mic’d stage, every foot in sync. It’s impressively well drilled but strangely dispiriting. Scaling up a simple movement can create transcendent effects — as Petipa, Balanchine and Busby Berkeley have all proved — but flamenco loses half its magic when rehearsed to this pitch. Baras has never made any apology for this control freakery: “You have to have structure; improvisation is what I do myself,” she once told me.
In “Sea” the Baras backing band are decked out in fishnet shawls and long-tailed turquoise frocks, dutifully step-twirling in unison and canon. Baras herself scorns to wear the ruffles of the traditional bata de cola but the flowing bias-cut gown by Luis F Dos Santos has charms of its own, flaring around her pirouetting form like a Loïe Fuller lily.
Baras is supported by some superb musicians including the splendid cantaora May Fernández, Alexis Lefevre’s idiosyncratic violin and fine guitar playing from Keko Baldomero and Andrés Martínez, but they were let down by over-amplification and a dodgy sound mix.
The music was never trusted to hold the stage by itself. Lefevre’s light-fingered copla in “Fly” was almost suffocated by dancing girls. Vuela was conceived as a tribute to flamenco guitar legend Paco de Lucía and Óscar Gómez De Los Reyes’s lighting pays homage to him with a cat’s cradle of laser-like spotlights which criss-cross the stage to mimic guitar strings. In Baldomero’s bewitching soléa during “Death”, this lighting gimmick went into overdrive, pinging strings across the stage one at a time to distract from his sublime playing — were they afraid we’d get bored?
Baras has a slightly limited expressive range for a bailaora but gave a tireless display of her trademark zapateado, her matt black Mary Janes establishing a woodpecker rhythm then setting up a thrilling call-and-response between the rippling guitar and the percussive purr of her toes and heels. The joyous encore was a world away from the spectacle that preceded it, musicians gamely showing off their moves, a smiling Baras finally letting her hair down.
★★★☆☆
To June 1, sadlerswells.com, festival continues to June 8, flamencofestival.org/en/ff-london-2025
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