It’s hard not to talk about flamenco in clichés. You know the audience will leap to its feet roaring, after the inner soul of the Gypsy has been revealed, and will head out, warmed, into the frigid winter night. All this was true of World Music’s Flamenco Festival last weekend at the Shubert Theater, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the differences between the two alternating companies.

Star dancers Juana Amaya and Farruquito do " flamenco puro, " which isn’t what it sounds like to American ears. When we think " pure " dancing, we imagine technique, refinement, and cool beauty, someone like the late Danish danseur noble Erik Bruhn. In flamenco, " puro " seems to refer to the performing situation rather than to any performing style. Flamenco is a highly developed and personal kind of folk expression, with a serpentine political and racial history that escapes that the American audience. The interpretation, the temperament, is what this audience wants to see.

A " flamenco puro " show, if Amaya y Farruquito’s Por Derecho is typical, is not much more than a revue, a showcase, for dances and songs. What’s on view can range from tender to tasteless, but everyone performs to the max. There are few concessions to theatricality — instruments, voices, and feet are miked, and maybe there’s some dramatic lighting. It’s the mixture of personalities that defines a particular show or company.

The 20-year-old Farruquito and his teenage brother Farruco are heirs to a famous flamenco family. They joined forces with Juana Amaya (no relation to the great Carmen Amaya, it seems) for the current tour. All three of them were uninhibited virtuosos, with flying hair and pieces of clothing that got tugged and wrapped and peeled off at moments of uncontainable passion. They started the show with an effective staging of the intimate relationship between dance and song. Each one appeared in turn, in response to a different singer (José Valencia, Jorge El Canastero and Enrique El Extremeño). The singer stood behind the dancer, as if invoking, explaining, or describing the dancer’s state of mind.

When the trio began to dance, first in solos, then together, they emerged as individuals. Farruquito, with tremendous speed and suspenseful changes of rhythm, worked up a teasing relationship with the audience, which of course wanted more and more of his bravado. Farruco used a lot of torso moves, as if he couldn’t release all his energy through his feet, and he threw in syncopations and steps from other pop dance styles.

Juana Amaya continues the style of aggressive female dancing that Carmen Amaya started. She has fabulously intricate footwork and doesn’t try to draw your attention by framing the body with seductive gestures. I loved the way she seemed to grow more centered the faster the went, and the way she strode around the stage at the height of her fury.

The company included an older man, Pepe Torres, who walked around the space, inserting spurts of stamping, like an orator thinking up his next rousing phrase. The percussionist, Manuel Soler, did a wonderful solo. Clapping his own rhythms, he danced with seamless transitions from soft to harsh steps. He sat down on his wooden box drum and continued, as if dancing and drumming were all the same thing.

For all I know, the company had been put together for the US tour they were initiating here, but they seemed to have a great rapport together, and after a string of riotous bows, it was the female singer, La Tana, who danced a little solo and led the rest of them away.

Ballet Flamenco Sara Baras, a company of a dozen musicians and an equal number of dancers, premiered an ambitious dance drama, Mariana Pineda. Sara Baras represents the contemporary flamenco dancer, " non-puro, " I suppose. She works in modeling and TV as well as concertizing and choreographing flamenco-inspired works. Mariana Pineda, which was directed by Luis Pasqual and had a commissioned score by Manolo Sanlúcar, is based on a Federico García Lorca play about a female Spanish patriot who was executed in the 19th century for defying the monarchy.

The program gave a sketchy guide to the work, but even with the aid of the more extensive synopsis provided to the press, the murky progression of images I saw on stage never gelled into a plot. People streamed in and out in a rapidly changing swirl of gowns, capes, and nuns’ habits. The constant tremor of heel beats seemed to conjure events from Pineda’s life, a saga of embraces and partings, defiance and regret, in a space that was both divided and multiplied by a heavy grill-like fence with a mirror behind it. Characters flowed into and in front of this deceptive setting, changing costumes and roles for reasons that were not evident. At least three and possibly all four of the main characters had doubles or appeared in different guises.

What the ballet came down to, really, was Baras’s duets with the men in Pineda’s life, who were danced by Miguel Cañas, José Serrano, and Luis Ortega. The first was impetuous, with snaky arms and thrust-forward shoulders. The second was romantic; he touched her body a lot and even lifted her — maybe a first for flamenco. The third was argumentative, harsh, and though she seemed at times attracted to him, she pushed him out through the gate.

Baras danced a long solo at the end with a black tape around her neck — Pineda died by hanging. Although the ballet was all dance, the opportunities for sustained invention and stepwork were restricted by the dramatic encounters and the scenic effects. There was a fine ensemble number with 10 dancers in capes and hats where they beat a tight unison foot rhythm, changing directions together, while someone sang what might have been the narration.

EVER SINCE THE INVENTION OF BALLET, males have been the subordinate gender. And for almost all those 250 years, they’ve been self-conscious about it. Born To Be Wild, which airs this Monday, February 3, at 10 p.m. on WGBH as part of PBS’s Great Performances series, tries a hybrid approach to the rehabilitation of the male image. It intercuts capsule bios of four " alpha males " of American Ballet Theatre with rehearsals and performance of a strictly classical piece made for them by Mark Morris.

The video’s four principals are engaging characters; they seem at ease when they talk to the camera, though only one of them, Ethan Stiefel, is a native-born American; Ángel Corella is from Spain, Vladimir Malakhov from Ukraine, and José Manuel Carreño from Cuba. They don’t seem too conceited, and they deny that there’s any competition between them even though they share the big roles in the ABT repertory. That would be unusual enough, but the show also comes up with novel riffs on some old themes. It would be interesting to know whether the renovations were the idea of producer-director Judy Kinberg, ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie, or the dancers themselves.

The show goes lightly over the time-honored trope " Ballet is just another macho sport, " but it does want us to know that these guys aren’t, you know, swishy. In the opening credits, Ethan Stiefel is streaking down the pike on his Harley, on the way back to his childhood home town in Wisconsin. Why he likes ballet, he grins, is that you get to work with women all day. Corella admits he was no good at soccer; he switched to karate but couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Ballet was the sport that took.

But they’re no cloistered artistes. Corella, like his colleagues, is an international traveler; he also initiated a line of name-brand dancewear that supports his family back in Madrid. Carreño swings with the locals in a Havana salsa club. Malakhov, after being rejected twice by Bolshoi Ballet director Yuri Grigorovich, went out and won some ballet competitions, and when Grigorovich finally got interested, he told the great man it was too late.

Their boss, Kevin McKenzie, can’t get over the company’s good fortune in having these men. At one time, he remarks, there were five ballerinas in ABT and they fought all the time — for partners! What the video seems to argue is that male dancers are more than the lifters and promenaders required in old ballets. But though ABT has a 20th-century repertory that stretches from Fokine to Jerome Robbins to Ann Reinking, much of it reversing this very stereotype, the generous clips featuring the four were all drawn from the 19th-century classics. The selections covered only those solo variations that feature the biggest leaps, stretchiest legs, and fastest pirouettes. The lone occasion on which we saw anyone dancing alongside a woman was Carreño doing an excerpt from Diana and Acteon with his cousin. Forget about those ABT ballerinas.

Women are a shadowy presence throughout the film, appearing only because they’ve been the teachers of the four leading men. At one point the music from Theme and Variations plays under a shot of Cuban Ballet director Alicia Alonso; it’s never mentioned that George Balanchine choreographed it for her and the phenomenal Igor Youskevitch, back in Ballet Theatre’s big-ballerina days.

PHOTOS BY ERIC ANTONIOU