Sat straight back, in shirtsleeves, hands on knees on the edge of a seat crowded with my winter rig: duvet jacket, hoodie, scarf. The whole of my attention is on the elegant and joyful riot of Paula Comitre’s duo, Alegorias (El limite y sus mapas).
Then I sense Spring.
Like dear old Mole in Wind in the Willows, sudden joy splutters up my spine.
Attention broken, I sniff the air, glance eyes only slowly from side to side – Rattie? Toad? Badger?
There’s an unknown perfume to the air, a strange blur to the light.
Not Spring, but a Spring.
A Spring of buds, not blooms. One of questioning over expectation.
Thunder in a clear sky, ripples in a still pond.
Alegorias (El limite y sus mapas), “Parable (The map’s edge)”, is just this – excited Mole feeling along the seams and textures of the huge black polyurethane tarp that is thrown over time to come, scrabbling at its intriguing shapes and contours … trying hard to descry time’s always-near country. By the complex operation of quantum mechanics on human physics, the tarp is the same my parents used to cover the tomato starts down at the farm.
And just so, in just such an intense, searching groove, Paula Comitre and partner Lorena Nogal tune and twist their Flamenco to channeling, spirit and sex and appropriately, pretty much the entire repertory of modern, classic and contemporary dance.
Comitre and Nogal power-skip over every millimeter of that obscure tarp. They call in Spain’s clichés. Sancho Panza – Look! That woman with her hair-pulled back hard enough to hurt is mumming a bull! There! Ferdinand the Bull: old sour pusses in mantillas, fat men with wens sweating as the toreador draws blood, tight black flaring bell-skirts… They foot stomp! They ignite booming and rattling drums and clashes of cymbal, careen through stage mechanicals, figure under savvy lighting. They get in behind curtains, tear them down, wear them. They wind up like gorgeous cobras thrilling as whiskey-voiced hidalgos caterwaul to peripatetic guitar plunkers. My smiling eyes taste imperial brocade, insatiable women of iron, desire so tight none’s ever got in…
It’s too much and so much that it’s just perfect. That’s talent, I reckon. I hope she keeps it up, especially the dance channeling.
The people around me, who look like they know a lot more about every damn little thing than I ever will, they think she’s perfect, too. They slap their hands together and some even cry Olé! For them, none of this searching and skipping has landed amiss, nothing has fallen astray. For them, Paula Comitre’s Pure Flamenco. OK.
As for me, squinty old Mole carried away in a Spring, I’m thinking it’s Paula Comitre, 27, and her whole generation might be under that old black tarp. As a vision, it sure beats bare-chested Vladimir Putin riding a hypersonic missile.
Alegorias (El limite y sus mapas) is Paula Comitre’s first collaborative performance. At the Chaillot Flamenco Biennale 2022 presentation, the troupe included Lorena Nogal (dance and co-writing), Juan Campallo, (guitarist), Rafael Moises Heredia (percussionist) and Tomas de Perrate (singer). Alegorias follows a solo, Cámara abierta, “Open room”, a solo, presented to acclaim in 2020.
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