E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fervent stagings World Music’s Flamenco Festival, Boston Ballet’s Raw Dance BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Most flamenco performances we see are centered on dancers and their individual styles. The two works on Compañía Andaluza de Danza’s program at the Cutler Majestic, in the fifth World Music Flamenco Festival last weekend, gave us a chance to see a more theatrical side of Spanish dancing.

Antonio Gades’s 1974 Blood Wedding is powerful dance drama. If you knew the Federico García Lorca play from which the dance is drawn, you could fill in the layers of poetry and the complexity of its doom-invested ancient family feuds. In Gades’s stark portrait of jealousy, a bridegroom discovers that his wife has a lover, and he’s whipped into a murderous rage by his possessive mother and the lover’s cast-off wife. Gades staged these essentials as a gripping dance about conflict and community.

The story unfolds in a series of small encounters between the principal characters, with a sparing use of flamenco’s flashy footwork. Some of these duologues convey the narrative through acting and gestures, but others use dance conventions, like imitation and mirroring. The lover and his wife dance the same movements in opposite directions, pulling away from each other in their discordant relationship. He and the bride he can’t have move in synch, often one behind the other in close contact and then, in separate parts of the stage, yearning and embracing thin air with identical movements.

All of the characters dance expressive refrains that illustrate their motives and temperament — the groom’s cocky assurance and his devotion to his mother, the matriarch’s foreboding and her influence over her son, the unhappy lovers, and the fury of the rejected wife. Each dance has a slightly exaggerated sense of time, so you linger over the characters and their interwoven fates. Neither García Lorca nor Gades takes sides about the moral issues. The history must be played out to its conclusion.

Gades brings the characters together and the plot to a climax at the wedding, in the intensifying presence of a crowd of guests. The confrontations and revelations take place while everyone is having a good time dancing, and after the bride runs away, followed by the furious groom, the lights dim and the guests stand looking in all directions, to the suspenseful sound of clicking fingers. The bride and the lover flee with a sliding, rising step, as if they were together on horseback. The groom with a posse chases them, their feet scraping and stamping in the same rhythm only much louder, and ominous.

When the fugitives are, inevitably, caught, the two enemies fight with knives in extreme slow motion, dancing another duet. This time the moves are thrust and parry, fall away, confront. Finally there’s the stabbing — each one finds his target — and then the falling, slower and slower, to stillness. The bride steps out between them, having lost both.

The company’s director/choreographer, José Antonio, contributed another theater piece, La Leyenda, in homage to the great flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya. In the same vein as Blood Wedding, but a little less austere and devastating, the dance features a Woman (Úrsula López) and a Spirit (Elena Algado) as the two sides of Carmen Amaya’s persona: the rebel who challenged tradition by dancing male roles, and the glamorous interpreter of female flamenco style.

Both dances were tightly structured and precisely crafted, with little room for the sometimes messy improvisatory thrills you get from a conventional flamenco show. But besides their artful storytelling, they featured flamenco movement for the ensemble as well as the soloists. These massed step rhythms created a special excitement, and as the groups traveled across the space together or moved in small counterpointed units, the ballets acquired the added interest of visual design.

Theatricality of another sort pervaded Sueños ("Dreams"), by Ballet Flamenco Sara Baras, which shared the festival weekend with Compañía Andaluza. Sara Baras brought a big dance drama to the festival last year, but this year’s show was more like a traditional flamenco presentation, with flamboyant touches and an upbeat spirit.

It opened with music by an ensemble of two guitars, two singers, percussion, and violin seated on a platform at the back of the stage. The dancing began with a choreographed number for the five women and two men of the company — Baras herself and guest artist José Serrano didn’t make their appearance until later in the program. In the opening dance, the company rapped canes on the floor in fast rhythms that soon thickened as they added their stamping feet. There was a dance for the women in black ruffled gowns with black shawls.

Finally Baras appeared. In the same way that she created suspense with her delayed arrival, her first moves held back on big effects as she twined her arms around her body and at last let loose some fiery taps. Serrano joined her, and with five men clapping an accompaniment in the background, they danced a pas de deux. Beginning face to face, they separated for contrasting solo variations. She looked very contained, her feet moving at a rapid, vibrating pace that changed accents within an even flow. His rhythms varied greatly, and he seemed compelled to fling off the force of his attack in big upper-body and leg gestures.

After this, the program built gradually, with more group dances and long, discursive solos by Baras and Serrano. In the finale, the ensemble were all on stage, clapping antiphonal rhythms for Baras and shouting encouragement as she charged herself into higher and higher gear. She flounced and spiraled in an extraordinary white silk dress with flying panels. Hitching up her skirts above her knees, she hammered her feet faster and faster, until it seemed the only way she could stop was to throw her arms up or behind her in tremendous assertive gestures. Then she’d walk or prance along the line of appreciative colleagues, and as soon as she caught her breath and the audience calmed down, she’d be off again.

There was something endearing about the way Baras orchestrated this crescendo of energy and then showed the audience how much she enjoyed its rapturous response. In an extended post-finale finale, she invited some of the dancers to alternate with her wilder and wilder improvising, and when they’d offered their best variations of the moment, she gave them each a big hug.

AT THE BOSTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS’ CYCLORAMA, the latest in Boston Ballet’s Raw Dance series allowed us to see members of the company up close and in unusual roles. Viktor Plotnikov’s Elegant Souls seemed the most assured of the seven works on the program. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising since Plotnikov has done a lot of choreographing within and outside Boston Ballet. His piece deployed Larissa Ponomarenko, Barbara Kohoutková, Romi Beppu, Rie Ichikawa, Joel Prouty, and Szabolcs Varga in various combinations, to several stylistically different short pieces of classical music. The movement, as in all the works on the program, seemed deliberately offbeat. Unlike some of the works, which just seemed kinky, this one made classical sense. The dancers seemed to have faith in it. They trusted its formal designs and didn’t overplay its wit.

There was also a fine character study, Dark Silent Light, by Yury Yanowsky, a relationship that evolved from conflict to warmth, between a resolute teacher (April Ball) and a tempestuous blind child (Pollyana Ribeiro). Despite the predictability that came from its associations with the story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, the piece gave both dancers dramatic and movement opportunities that they took on eagerly.

Of the other pieces, Unbound was a classical essay for two couples and six supporting women by Melissa Hough where everyone wore black midriff-baring biker shorts and tan bra affairs. Standard formal line-ups and sequences remained in place even though the dancers’ bodies snaked and skidded into unaccustomed lines. Miao Zong did a solo for himself, Le Chant de Dieu, in which he seemed to hack off each pristine balletic move in order to execute something unapproved but equally stunning. If I Can’t Have You was a retro duet for co-choreographers Sarah Edery and Michael Cusumano, a courtship for a cutie and a punk, with a last-minute joke Jerome Robbins might have thought up. Yanowsky made an absurdist, prop-laden quartet, The Sofa, for the closing piece.

There were movable fun-house mirrors and a score that was partly taped (by David Darling and Robert Rutman) and partly improvised (by violinist Rohan Gregory and cellist Reinmar Seidler on Friday night) in Gianni Di Marco’s Warp. What with the music and the mirrors and some overwrought dancing by Sarah Lamb, Heather Myers, John Lam, and Raul Salamanca, it was hard to keep track of the choreography, though it might have been serious.

Di Marco and Plotnikov are the organizers of Raw Dance, and during the prolonged final bows Friday night, the dancers seemed as appreciative as the audience.