Field Hall Presents: Noche Flamenca, La Ronde (Entre Tuì y Yo)
Saturday, March 1 @ 7PM | Donna M. Morris Theater

Flamenco in its purest form: an evening of duets, solos, and company pieces by Martín Santangelo, Soledad Barrio, and Noche Flamenca.

Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca, the renowned company founded by Artistic Director Martín Santangelo and dancer Soledad Barrio, return with a new version of La Ronde (Between You and Me), an evening-length program of duets and ensemble works. 

Apollinaire Scherr, in a review for The Financial Times, described La Ronde “as flamenco puro—the Spanish art stripped to its flammable core.” Brian Seibert wrote in The New York Times, “The visual design is no more elaborate than cafe chairs and a spotlight. The wonderful musicians and the dancers’ feet are barely amplified. That’s all in accord with the company aesthetic: bare bones, nothing to hide behind, nothing to get in the way.” 

“La Ronde,” a work inspired by Max Ophüls’ 1950 film, and the dizzying carousel of romantic and sexual relationships it presents, that Noche Flamenca has been developing for four years. True to the company’s boundary-pushing and emotionally probing style, in “La Ronde,” artistic director and choreographer Martin Santangelo uses a series of duets to explore love, hate, jealousy, and death. The piece draws inspiration from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, the pianist James Booker, the story of Cain and Abel, Demeter & Persephone, and other sources, in addition to Ophüls.  

Also part of the program is “Refugiados” (“Refugees”), created from poems by children in refugee camps. To develop “Refugiados”—first created 15 years ago, and further developed for the engagement at the Connelly—Santangelo and the company took the children’s poems, translated them to Spanish, and set them to song and dance.

Finally, La Ronde includes Soledad’s Barrio’s signature, “Soleá,” which exemplifies the catharsis at the heart of flamenco. In it, she displays the singular artistry Tobi Tobias attributed to her in ArtsJournal, where she wrote, “What woman could hold a candle to Soledad Barrio? In modern dance, Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham. In ballet, maybe Nora Kaye, in her Tudor roles. Certainly no one we can go and see today has Barrio’s transformative power.”