Although flamenco dance is based on codified forms (alegría, bulería, solea, siguiriya, for example), what audiences go to see is the way individual dancers and musicians interpret the forms. In that sense, flamenco is always contemporary, always popular. World Music’s interesting flamenco doubleheader last weekend at the Emerson Majestic showed us two very different ways of carrying on this movable and eclectic tradition.

Farruquito y Familia was the more conventionally staged event, an evening of dance numbers and songs presented as flat-out display. The guitarist and three singers sat in a row on an upstage platform, bringing on the dancers one at a time to do solos and occasional ensembles.

Eighteen-year-old Farruquito (Juan Manuel Fernández) heads a venerable flamenco family. Accompanied by his father and three other musicians, he danced with his mother, his aunt, his brother, and two young cousins, in a show that had tremendous collective energy and an unusually upbeat spirit. The fact that the performers are related determined this dynamic as much as their body types and ages: the two women were statuesque, the boys were ages 8, 10, and 12. This combination precluded the seething, sexy duets that so often seem to define flamenco. Farruquito y Familia suggested that you can dance about things other than desperation and desire. There was the boyish bravado that found its release in punches, kicks, and skipping exits; the playful seductiveness and parental pride of the women; and their unabashed appreciation for one another.

I expected the male contingent to be whizbang steppers, and they were. Farruquito let loose with volleys of stamps, vibrations, and everything in between. He’d whang out a big surge of complicated rhythm, wind it up with a sudden attitude, then slowly, importantly gather himself for another attack. The younger boys echoed their leader, but each also had his own special steps.

I thought the women were especially wonderful. Rosario Montoya (La Farruca) had a furious power, her skirts and her long hair lashing out to expand her already ample space as she spun in out-of-control turns. Pilar Montoya (La Faraona), an even bigger woman, bounced and twisted and shook her thunderous hips with a joyful confidence undreamed of by any size-4 ballerina.

La Tirana, the theater piece by Compañía María Pagés, was more ambitious and more modern — if modern means theatricalized. María Pagés was the original Spanish dancer in Riverdance, an obvious precedent for La Tirana. But in the early ’80s she danced in the Carlos Saura/Antonio Gades movie Carmen, and La Tirana hints at Saura’s narrative movies, with their integration of dance, character, and story. Pagés has also danced in Gades’s concert company. I don’t know whether Gades was the first to choreograph flamenco for an expressive ensemble, but his work in Carmen clearly influenced Pagés.

La Tirana tweaks an old pretext: paintings (statues, toys) come to life when the museum or toyshop is closed, and they dance until a stray human wanders into their revels. Here, museumgoers gape at a reproduction of Goya’s famous portrait of the Duchess of Alba, which hangs in the Prado in Madrid. Enamored of the painting, one man (Ángel Múñoz) stays behind when the museum closes, and he rouses Pagés, as the duchess. When she steps out of the painting, she leads him through a series of dance visions inspired by period artworks. She’s not reluctant to join him in a bit of 20th-century rugcutting either.

Four live musicians wove in and out of recorded accompaniments by, among others, Riverdance’s Bill Whelan, Astor Piazzolla, Franz Schubert, and Miles Davis. Pagés did a shadow dance to the “Casta diva” aria from Bellini’s Norma. An 18th-century flamenco minuet morphed, along with the Pachelbel Canon, into a jazzy contradance. There was a masked dance with a bullfight in it, and a love duet to “Autumn Leaves.” Just before the fantasies came to an end, Pagés, Múñoz, and Manuel Soler, as Goya, inserted a four-bar softshoe into their Spanish rendition of Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain.”

The wild diversity of the show, and its very thin plot pretext, weren’t as disorienting as they might seem. You could see right off, as the corps of eight museumgoers collected into a terrific, clattering unison dance, that the show was about flamenco variations, not really about reanimating art history. Under the direction of José María Sánchez, it was theatrical and effective. Pagés’s strength is her flamboyant arms and arching torso. Múñoz and the pounding patterns of the chorus took care of the footwork. So La Tirana provided a visual spectacle as well as a rhythmic one.

Although flamenco dance is based on codified forms (alegría, bulería, solea, siguiriya, for example), what audiences go to see is the way individual dancers and musicians interpret the forms. In that sense, flamenco is always contemporary, always popular. World Music’s interesting flamenco doubleheader last weekend at the Emerson Majestic showed us two very different ways of carrying on this movable and eclectic tradition.

Farruquito y Familia was the more conventionally staged event, an evening of dance numbers and songs presented as flat-out display. The guitarist and three singers sat in a row on an upstage platform, bringing on the dancers one at a time to do solos and occasional ensembles.

Eighteen-year-old Farruquito (Juan Manuel Fernández) heads a venerable flamenco family. Accompanied by his father and three other musicians, he danced with his mother, his aunt, his brother, and two young cousins, in a show that had tremendous collective energy and an unusually upbeat spirit. The fact that the performers are related determined this dynamic as much as their body types and ages: the two women were statuesque, the boys were ages 8, 10, and 12. This combination precluded the seething, sexy duets that so often seem to define flamenco. Farruquito y Familia suggested that you can dance about things other than desperation and desire. There was the boyish bravado that found its release in punches, kicks, and skipping exits; the playful seductiveness and parental pride of the women; and their unabashed appreciation for one another.

I expected the male contingent to be whizbang steppers, and they were. Farruquito let loose with volleys of stamps, vibrations, and everything in between. He’d whang out a big surge of complicated rhythm, wind it up with a sudden attitude, then slowly, importantly gather himself for another attack. The younger boys echoed their leader, but each also had his own special steps.

I thought the women were especially wonderful. Rosario Montoya (La Farruca) had a furious power, her skirts and her long hair lashing out to expand her already ample space as she spun in out-of-control turns. Pilar Montoya (La Faraona), an even bigger woman, bounced and twisted and shook her thunderous hips with a joyful confidence undreamed of by any size-4 ballerina.

La Tirana, the theater piece by Compañía María Pagés, was more ambitious and more modern — if modern means theatricalized. María Pagés was the original Spanish dancer in Riverdance, an obvious precedent for La Tirana. But in the early ’80s she danced in the Carlos Saura/Antonio Gades movie Carmen, and La Tirana hints at Saura’s narrative movies, with their integration of dance, character, and story. Pagés has also danced in Gades’s concert company. I don’t know whether Gades was the first to choreograph flamenco for an expressive ensemble, but his work in Carmen clearly influenced Pagés.

La Tirana tweaks an old pretext: paintings (statues, toys) come to life when the museum or toyshop is closed, and they dance until a stray human wanders into their revels. Here, museumgoers gape at a reproduction of Goya’s famous portrait of the Duchess of Alba, which hangs in the Prado in Madrid. Enamored of the painting, one man (Ángel Múñoz) stays behind when the museum closes, and he rouses Pagés, as the duchess. When she steps out of the painting, she leads him through a series of dance visions inspired by period artworks. She’s not reluctant to join him in a bit of 20th-century rugcutting either.

Four live musicians wove in and out of recorded accompaniments by, among others, Riverdance’s Bill Whelan, Astor Piazzolla, Franz Schubert, and Miles Davis. Pagés did a shadow dance to the “Casta diva” aria from Bellini’s Norma. An 18th-century flamenco minuet morphed, along with the Pachelbel Canon, into a jazzy contradance. There was a masked dance with a bullfight in it, and a love duet to “Autumn Leaves.” Just before the fantasies came to an end, Pagés, Múñoz, and Manuel Soler, as Goya, inserted a four-bar softshoe into their Spanish rendition of Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain.”

The wild diversity of the show, and its very thin plot pretext, weren’t as disorienting as they might seem. You could see right off, as the corps of eight museumgoers collected into a terrific, clattering unison dance, that the show was about flamenco variations, not really about reanimating art history. Under the direction of José María Sánchez, it was theatrical and effective. Pagés’s strength is her flamboyant arms and arching torso. Múñoz and the pounding patterns of the chorus took care of the footwork. So La Tirana provided a visual spectacle as well as a rhythmic one.