Ballet Flamenco Sara Baras, Alma review ★★★★★

As the lights go down, you can feel the electric current of expectation in a Sadler’s Wells packed to the rafters. In the dark, Keko Baldomero’s guitar sounds warm and yearning chords. A Spanish voiceover recites, ‘I am the soul that dances unchained... my flamenco heart has bolero soul’ (text and full translation in the programme).

And then she’s there. Possibly the greatest flamenco dancer of her generation, Sara Baras is back at Sadler’s Wells for the first time in four years, and how we’ve missed her! She opens this year's Flamenco Festival with her new show, Alma (Soul), starting with a bolero solo of extraordinary skill and intensity, her feet tapping on the sound-wired stage in a crescendo of machine-gun fire zapateado, her arms rising and extending like capricious wings.


Sara Baras, Alma. Photo: Sofia Wittert
Baras’s flamenco is the real thing, not the anodyne, cliché-ridden, tourist-friendly format that prevailed in Spain during the long, culturally emasculating Franco dictatorship, but something a lot more visceral, more modern, that explores the genre’s own variations – seguiriya, buleria and bolero, for example – alongside its connections with other musical/dance forms, such as the rumba.

In one of Alma’s most entrancing sequences, Diego Villegas gives us a long saxophone solo, which is closer to jazz improv than you could possibly expect in a flamenco show, after which Baras engages in a playful music/dance dialogue with the sax.


Sara Baras and Diego Villegas in Alma. Photo: Sofia Wittert
Baras is backed by an excellent company: six dancers – Chula Garcia, Charo Pedraja, Daniel Saltares, Cristina Aldón, Noella Vilches and Marta de Troya – two guitarists, two singers and two percussionists, with Villegas deploying his talents on sax, harmonica and flute.

Unlike in her 2019 show, Sombras, where the dancing ensemble seemed a little underused, in Alma everybody gets a good crack at showing their talent in numbers that alternate between moments of intense introspection and explosions of boisterous dancing.

The powerful voices of Rubio De Pruna and Matías Lopes ‘El Mati’ ring around the theatre, singing of their jolly or anguished tales, or urging the dancers on. Sometimes their intensity sends shivers down your spine.

The percussion of Antón Suárez and Manuel Muñoz ‘El Pájaro’ enters into vibrant challenges with the zapateado, augmented by flamenco’s characteristic clapping, and all this, combined with the guitars of Keko Baldomero and Andrés Martínez, has an exhilarating effect.

Luis F Santos’s wardrobe, enhanced by Chiqui Ruiz’s vivid lighting, uses traditional elements, such as the polka dot, in new ways, and all female dancers alternate between male and female costumes.


Ballet Flamenco Sara Baras, Alma. Photo: Sofia Wittert
And, of course, it includes the specular ‘manton’, the large embroidered silk shawl with which flamenco dancers create extraordinary shapes and movement (top image).

After the formal show, the company engages in the usual ‘fin de fiesta’, a kind of downstage jam session, where each musician gets an opportunity to show off his dancing moves. And good as they all are, the night belongs to Sara Baras, flamenco royalty and still very much at the top of her game after a 20-plus-year career.