Alegria Academia’s latest production Una Forma De Vivir presented a mixed bag, showcasing various established and developing talents in Malta’s flamenco dance scene alongside current students of the Academia.
They played off one another with expert attention
At its finest, the performance suggested a new direction for flamenco dancers working within a Maltese milieu. Held at the beautifully maintained Salesians theatre in Sliema, the show was coordinated by Alegria Academia director Ingrid Sciberras, and featured stylish contributions by dance veteran Mavin Khoo.
Ultimately, the evening was a strange mixture of professionalism and an end-of-year recital – not a particularly successful combination as it left parents (with little interest other than snapping photos of their daughters) bewildered for the entire second act after the school girls had finished, and aficionados, who’d turned up for an evening of quality dancing, a little nonplussed by the first fumbled hour.
Which is not to say that some of the young dancers didn’t contribute to the evening’s success, and were not themselves perfectly acceptable taken on their own merits. However, seen in contrast to the performances of Sciberras, Ema Attard and Estelle Sant, it felt like two different shows uncomfortably shoehorned into one.
The stage was well dressed and the lighting choices were made with an eye for detail. It’s a shame that the sound levels were unbalanced throughout, and the lack of live music (except for a token piece with a violin, and a percussive sequence) was disappointing.
Although living in Malta makes it difficult to secure the kind of voice and guitar talent necessary for flamenco, their absence was keenly felt – a pre-recorded track can never replace their immediacy and intensity.
Flamenco has deep roots in Indian, Arabic and Spanish cultures, and is immediately recognisable with its repertoire of precise arm movements and rhythmic footsteps. The style incorporates patterns born out of this rhythm, and nourished by this variety of traditions. That’s why the idea of a single, definitive flamenco, somehow the possession of any one culture or school, is so potentially damaging.
The greatest joy of the evening was watching Attard dance through the flamenco idiom. It wasn’t simply a skillful assembly of choreography and music; the dancer was herself present and intimately alive to the activity on stage. An audience can pick up on a lot of subtlety, and Attard conveyed that in her work.
There is something about flamenco that speaks to a certain kind of woman – it’s not the ethereal radiance of ballet. The flamenco style, especially that being developed in Malta, is grounded in something mythical, something heavily mysterious. Sensual but still engaged in technical refinement, expressive but elusive – the best things about the Alegria style are not necessarily offshoots of any ‘legitimate’ school, and that’s important.
Any kind of enslavement to tradition, more so a foreign tradition that can never be fully assimilated, thwarts so much potential artistry. Rather than aping a style, where dance is reduced to little more than a throwaway piece of theatre, what seems to be happening here is the development of something authentically local – the meeting of a Maltese sensibility and a dance mentality pushing against its geographical and socio-cultural boundaries.
The finale between Sciberras and Sant, as well as a daintier sequence between Sarah Bianchi and Nicola Fenech Henson, deserve special mention. The latter pair, dressed in white, performed in complete contrast to the rest of the dancers – their harmonious movements paved the way for a finale that was impressive, but a heavy note on which to end the evening.
Sciberras and Sant embodied the elemental forces that flamenco tries to communicate, in a dance that was all stormy energy, each movement carefully articulated to further the emotional turmoil on stage.
They played off one another with expert attention, and it was this level of dancing that the audience would have enjoyed to see throughout – and perhaps that’s what Alegria has in store for us, in its upcoming performances.