“The tanguillo is a kind of folk music in Spain. It’s funny, and allows an aged woman like Poncia to play-act her first time with her husband,” says Tsai.
Meanwhile, Paco Lin, who dances the role of Pepe El Romano, the young heartthrob who plants the seeds of jealousy and discord among the sisters, is only on stage for a few minutes, but his two solos are pivotal to the narration.
In the first one, he courts Angustias (Wang), Bernarda’s eldest daughter, who he is marrying solely for her dowry. The dance is the rhythmically imposing farruca, which is traditionally danced only by men. Pepe dances it to Angustias, not with her.
On the other hand, Pepe’s second dance is a secret tryst with Adela, his true love; the duet is slow, sensual and yearning. Lin chose to dance the taranto with Huang, to a traditional song from Linares, an Andalusian mining town.
“The mine workers didn’t see the sun when they were working underground and they had to struggle to survive,” Lin says. “No one knows about Pepe’s hardship, so this is the song I chose for him.”
Tsai says the most challenging part of rehearsal for her was the acting, particularly in her interactions with Bernarda (Chen), who is torn between her duty to protect the social standing of her family after her husband’s death and her longing to take comfort in Poncia’s kindness.
“We had to work on our body language, our eye contact. Teresa tries to help us understand the correct way to use our voice and our eyes,” says Tsai.
In one particularly touching scene, the two dance together, almost as equals, before Bernarda suddenly catches herself, and as if to punish her for their careless lapse from propriety, brusquely tosses a rag to Poncia and orders her to scrub the floor. The abrupt ending to the tender, emotionally nuanced duet between the two women is startling and dramatically effective.
Flamenco has been part of the Taiwan dance scene for just a decade and Barja, who spent half a year creating The Daughters of Bernarda Alba, says that she would not have attempted a flamenco project of this complexity five years ago.
“All these dancers have studied in Spain, they are very into flamenco and they are very committed, so on a dance level I felt confident these are people who could do this,” says Barja, who hopes to pull together enough funding to tour the production through Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
She adds, “It’s a first attempt, but I’m not going to use that to apologize for it. I think, though, that if we get more chances to do it, we will get better.”
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