Flamenco Festival: Liñan/Riqueni review ★★★★★

Manuel Liñan is a compelling flamenco dancer. He is also a daring, innovative and uncompromising young artist, intent on overcoming flamenco’s strict codes for men and women. In ¡VIVA!, the show he brought to last year’s Flamenco Festival, seven male dancers explored their feminine side by dancing as women, and an exhilarating performance it proved to be.

You could be forgiven for thinking Liñan’s show at the Lilian Baylis studio in this year's Flamenco Festival, Amor Amado Amén, would be more of the same, but you would be very wrong.

Amor Amado Amén is a 45-minute performance that explores homosexual love and desire, by turns yearning, tender and ferocious. Supported by two musicians, multi-instrumentalist Sabio Janiak and flamenco guitarist Francisco Vinuesa, and an actor, Ivan Bavcevic, the show focuses on Liñan and his extraordinarily expressive body, face and, of course, dancing.

Liñan’s zapateado, by turns loud and assertive, soft and yearning, tentative and questioning, is in itself an eloquent storyteller, complemented by the expressiveness of Liñan small, taut body, and the sheer power of his eyes, now expressing a multitude of emotions as he engages with his fellow performers, now fixated on the audience as if to demand unwavering attention.

There’s no sequential narrative; rather, the show develops as a loose amalgam of emotions, expressions of a desire still coloured by its relatively recent proscription, and all the more burning for it.

The final sequence, a slow, intensely erotic duet between Liñan and Vinuesa’s guitar, is entrancing.

Later that evening the veteran flamenco guitarist Rafael Riqueni took to the Lilian Baylis stage for a solo concert entitled Herencia (Legacy). Seville-born Riqueni is a 61-year-old multi-award-winning guitar player and composer, whose gigantic contribution to Spanish music history is well documented.

There he was on an empty stage: one man in a plain white shirt and dark trousers, with his honey-coloured guitar, his music a universe all of its own.

For 90 intense minutes Riqueni’s nimble fingers caressed the strings eliciting crystalline chords and clear arpeggios, bringing out melodies that evoked ancestral cultures with such intent that gradually that hard-to-define feeling called ‘duende’, the ineffable presence that manifests itself only when performers and audience attain a state of absolute communion, descended upon us all.

And just as with Manuel Liñan's performance earlier that evening, you couldn't ask for more.