Sombras, Sadler's Wells, review: Sara Baras' flexible footwork opens London's Flamenco Festival with style
Flamenco star Sara Baras stalks on, dressed in a frock coat and trousers. Even in silhouette, it’s clear that the star of the show has arrived: she carries herself with commanding presence, with a sense of the storms of movement she’s about to unleash.
Baras’s new show Sombras (Shadows) opens this year’s Flamenco Festival London with style. This month, Sadler’s Wells will host a packed programme of shows, from traditional galas to the gloriously experimental Rocío Molina. Baras stands squarely in the middle, with classic dancing and modern, streamlined staging.
Baras is an international name, leading her own company for 20 years. She’s won a host of international honours – even a Barbie doll in her image. For Sombras, she’s joined by seven dancers and seven musicians, all seen at first as shadows on the backdrop, men and women in trousers. In recent years, flamenco has pushed harder at ideas of gender. Baras is more understated, but has made the farucca, traditionally a male style, her signature dance for two decades.
She’ll take stark poses, or stand with one hand to her breast, both modest and proud. Her footwork is flexible and astonishingly fast. In perhaps her best known move, she glides across the stage, heels drumming as she goes – sharp and powerful as a pneumatic drill, but purringly smooth.
Warmly lit by Óscar Gómez de los Reyes, the show is framed by sliding panels, with sketched outlines of dancers. Within this shifting frame, there are taut unison dances and moments of improvisation.
Returning in a satin dress, she whirls and poses, the layers of her skirts making bold shapes around her body, precise as a bullfighter’s cape. For this show, Baras avoids the traditional ruffled flamenco skirt, but shows a classic skill with fabric, from a flowing shawl to the spiky shapes she creates in a fringed dress. In another scene, both men and women wear simple skirts, showing off long lines of movement.
In one wonderfully intimate sequence, Baras and her percussionists trade rhythms as if the stage were their own private space. Her tapped footwork weaves in and out of handclaps and percussion instruments – including the mellow sound of a brass gourd – until she’s just listening, still and smiling, caught in the moment.
Until 7 July. Flamenco Festival London continues until 14 July. Box office 020 7863 8000
