In a little over an hour, Olga Pericet and her five musicians took their audience on a journey of slow meandering strolls and explosive sprints, starting with experimental theatre, moving on through freestyle dance and ending with flamenco puro. It was a free flowing, heavily nuanced performance characterised by a quest for innovation that was to be admired for the courage of the artists’ conviction but inevitably, hit and miss in varying impacts.
As a title, La Leona has a double meaning, obviously “the lioness” as an apt description for Pericet’s fierce, feline grace, but also the nickname for the famous guitar of Antonio de Torres, made in 1856, which is regarded as the prototype of all flamenco guitars. References to the latter came at both ends of the work: firstly, when two of her musicians turned to origami to cut the image of the body of a guitar from paper; and secondly, when Pericet appeared (standing on a bench to accentuate her height) in a stunning, frothy pink bata de cola (the traditional flamenco dress with a long frilly train) with deep pink guitar body shapes accentuating her costume design as both fascinator and armlets. In case we needed a reminder, a wooden board stood upright with the work’s title graffitied on its side. After a while, percussionist, Roberto Jaén dropped it to the floor as another platform for Pericet to dance upon, reminding the audience of one meaning of the title with a comedic snarl.
La Leona opened in a manner reminiscent of the curtain rising on Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon where Lescaut sits centre-stage, surrounded by a large circle of his cape. Here, a dimly lit body was surrounded by a cape but also covered by it. Jaén entered the stage and pulled the fabric away from the body, which turned out to be the show’s star, naked apart from a face mask, big pants and long socks. Her nudity was very tastefully done as Pericet slithered and rolled around the floor, often partially covered by the fabric until the sequence ended by her sitting face-on, breasts fully exposed, rather like Juliet sits on the bed contemplating her fate in MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. As if to fully bare herself physically, she then tore off the mask.
Prior to the origami, Jaén and Israel Moro (Pericet’s excellent, plaintiff singer) carried off another innovation by tapping the compas (the flamenco rhythms) on two pairs of large scissors, opening and closing the blades in front of microphones to create the percussion. It was something new but once tried, perhaps not to be repeated! In a work that is inspired by a famous guitar it was essential for the guitarists to be special and this was certainly the case. The flamenco guitarists, Jose Manuel León and José Tomás, were supported by the unusual presence of an electric bass guitarist, Juanfe Pérez, who had a raucous, electronic solo of his own midway through the show.
Costumes played a big part in the programme, designed by Pericet herself in association with the Ferrer clothing brand. In one scene that I felt didn’t work well, Pericet danced holding up a mustard-coloured raincoat, which she then wrapped around herself like a skirt. In her first danced solo, she wore an elegant black tailored trouser suit. The aforementioned fluffy pink bata de cola was dropped to the floor to reveal a second dress, which in turn was also disrobed to reveal Pericet in the black body and patterned black tights in which she finished the work. It was a pity that Pericet didn’t dance in the bata de cola (although it was so voluminous that dancing in it may have been impossible for the diminutive bailaora).
When Pericet danced, especially in her final explosive conversation with the guitar, it was with extraordinary footwork technique or with a freestyle of movement that seemed to reference salsa and samba and even the muscular isolation of hip-hop. She has the powerful stage presence of a star performer and a youthful athleticism that is extraordinary for her age (48). In La Leona there was less of her dancing than I would have liked but it was adequately compensated by her intimate and absorbing performance.
