No rose, but plenty of bite

When Teresa Barja was performing flamenco several years ago in Taipei, an audience member suddenly stepped up to her with a single long-stemmed rose.

Was it a tribute to Barja’s dancing finesse, or her elegance and poise?

“He wanted me to put in my teeth,” says Barja, still somewhat incredulous at the memory. She refused to bite, tossing the rose aside, and went on with her dance.

But Barja — the flamenco name of choreographer and Soochow University theater professor Catherine Diamond — decided to send up the stereotypical image of a flamenco dancer as a sultry lady brandishing a red rose during a scene in The Daughters of Bernarda Alba, the first full-length flamenco dance-drama performed in Taiwan. Audiences can watch the show tonight and tomorrow at Crown Theater (皇冠劇場).

That scene is one of the few light-hearted moments in the four-act performance. The rest of the drama, based on The House of Bernarda Alba by poet Federico Garcia Lorca, is dark, befitting a play that was written just as Spain was descending into civil war. Lorca was shot by Nationalist troops only two months after completing the drama in 1936.

Set in Andalusia, the original play centers around the five daughters of the title character, who struggle against the oppressive social mores rigidly upheld by their recently widowed mother. Barja collaborated with the lead dancers — Beta Chen (陳雅惠), Jessie Wang (王思穎), Luisa Lu (呂姿儀), Lucia Huang (黃惠汝), Sandra Tsai (蔡明娟) and Paco Lin (林志遠) — to create solos that would contribute to the narrative while deepening the audience’s understanding of each character.

While adapting the play, Barja cut the number of daughters down to three, partly to fit the number of dancers available, but also because she wanted audiences to have a sense of each of the women as individuals.

“In the original play, they are catty, they are cruel, they are repressed throughout the whole play, but I thought that would make us and the audience feel really grim, so the middle part is really kind of light-hearted, and then it descends into darkness,” says Barja.

Part of the challenge faced by Barja and her dance team was adapting a play by one of world literature’s most renowned prose artists into a performance that relies solely on movement, gesture and traditional flamenco music. Before each scene, the dancers and Barja would discuss the character’s motivations and brainstorm ways to express that through music and dance. Since the lead dancers have studied flamenco in Spain, Barja wanted to make sure each person’s individual training and background showed through in their solos, which the dancers choreographed themselves.

“I’ve helped them dramatize it, but they’ve contributed a lot of who they have learned from, so there are a lot of styles, which is precisely what I wanted,” says Barja.

For Sandra Tsai, the dancer who portrays Poncia, Bernarda’s long-suffering servant, the flirtatious tanguillo was the perfect dance for a scene where she describes her first date with her husband to Adela (played by Huang) and Martirio (Lu), Bernarda’s lively, curious and rebellious younger daughters. The dance is sexy and coy, but humorous, as Poncia pantomimes her lover’s tender (and not-so-tender) caresses, all the while playfully gripping the infamous rose.