Entertainment

Pride & passion

The only flowers in the flamenco show “Flores para los Muertos” (“Flowers for the Dead”) are in the dancers’ hair. But for what Noche Flamenca delivered Wednesday night — emotional singing, guitar playing and virtuoso dancing — it deserves bouquets.

In this tightly paced piece — part recital, part revue — the women wear simplified flamenco dresses. The men, in jackets and wild, often damp, hair, have a more disheveled elegance.

Artistic director Martin Santangelo has pushed toward narrative with some interesting results. One new number, “Quebradas” (translated here as “women turning themselves inside out”) starts as a flamenco version of a taciturn Harold Pinter play and winds up as desperate as something by Spanish poet García Lorca.

Two of the show’s stars, Soledad Barrio — the group’s co-founder and also Santangelo’s wife — and Alejandro Granados play a couple whose relationship’s on the rocks. Their dance dialogue is a volley of rattling footwork, but also hesitations and silences. What’s unsaid is just as important.

Four women then perform soliloquies of hope or disappointment, as the two guitarists become stand-ins for their absent partners. At the end, the women tap on their chests with their palms. It could be a rhythm, or their heartbeats.

But the pillars of the performance are more straightforward showpieces. Granados dances a pensive solo to the hoarse wails of a singer, a shawl wrapped around his neck like a memory.

Barrio dances two solos, the first showing off her virtuosity. Her finale, with slow, proud flourishes morphing into twisting moves and sudden stomps, personifies steely determination.

Juan Ogalla mesmerizes the crowd in “Alegrías,” preening and grabbing his jacket fronts as he tears into a flurry of steps. Shucking the coat, he ends with a series of rat-a-tat taps that slow down to a finger snap.

The performances make the show, but so does the direction. Opening on a sepulchral stage of empty chairs is the oldest cliché in the book, but things become clichéd because they work. Could there be a flamenco “Riverdance”? If anyone could pull it off, it’s this crew.