Review: Sadlers Wells Flamenco Festival 2010: Maria Pages, Autorretrato
I was very intrigued to see Maria Pages for the first time, not just for flamenco reasons, but very personal ones – I’d heard she is a very tall woman, indeed she is apparently known as “the dancer with endless arms”. I’m 5’11″, and have found no role models in flamenco. In fact my height is something I struggle with in class, constantly – partly awkwardness at standing out, partly worrying about whether I can be as graceful and speedy as the smaller girls, and partly just a general feeling of hulking second-rateness born of living in a society that values delicate, fragile, petite femininity, where women must be shorter than men, unless they are coltish, angular models, which I am not. So whatever I write, I know I am filtering it through my own fears, feelings and insecurities.
Pages definitely offered a vision to inspire – she has style and personality, and I left feeling energised and tapping the rhythms on the Tube platform. She is most definitely tall – at least my height – rangy and long-limbed, dwarfing tiny Eva Yerbabuena and Rafaela Carrasco; her body is athletic and powerful in a clean-cut, masculine way, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, her face handsome rather than pretty. She is indisputably the leader of her pack, an old-fashioned diva, the star of the show. She is witchy in the best sense of the word, like Florence (and the Machine), like Serafina Pekkala in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, or Tilda Swinton in The Chronicles of Narnia – she subverts expectations. When she moves she seems to be summoning up forces from the air. But I didn’t feel the spell working. Some moments left me quiet and deeply emotional with their beauty, though this was more often due to design than duende.
The opener began with a stunning image, Pages lit dramatically in front of a mirror. But it was emotionally leaden – it felt like a dry run-through, with too much arm posing and uninteresting footwork. The arms were a feature all the way through, I am guessing because they are her trademark – but there was too much of it. The following number raised the pace, her company of 4 men and 4 women demonstrating superb precision and expression in a rhythmic set piece that demanded absolute perfection and clarity of footwork as they all moved simultaneously. Another Pages solo, her in a little black dress in front of a moving mirror, was playful 
and magical – the mirror zigzagging across the stage, making her catch up and move with it, and finally rapping out a little echo of her final stamps. Charming and witty, it seemed to encapsulate Pages.
At one point the singing of Ana Ramon was so duskily rich and heartbreaking that I found myself thinking, rather darkly, that if I were dying, this would be the voice I’d want to hear. Wise, elegiac, calming, comforting but not in a sugary way – it sounded like a lament and a reassurance – it’s time to go, but also to become something else. My chest was tight, and I swallowed a lump in my throat. She has duende, and I’d have liked to hear much more of her. Her male counterpart Ismael de la Rosa was also a soulful, beautiful singer – powerful but without any harsh screeching.
Pages is a polymath, like Sara Baras – she is the star, the choreographer, the director, a lyricist, a musician, the set designer and the wardrobe designer. And her eye for set design is stunning. One scene took my breath away: the stage opened with three enormous golden picture frames hangng from the ceiling, and the company posed within them, lit like paintings, first still, then moving in the frames, then bursting out of them, dressed in sombre black. It reminded me of the film Frida, in fact as Pages reminds me a little of Frida Kahlo – something about her uncompromisingness, the set of her jaw.
Then Pages danced out of the central frame in a dress so lovely I practically had to sit on my hands to stop myself running on stage and ripping it off her. A simple vest dress, the top half nude and fading, dip-dye, into a rosy fuschia, double layered, fine transparent organza over an opaque lining. Pages has great taste, and the fact that a place in the credits is reserved for “Fabric dyeing and painting” by Maria Calderon’s workshop says it all. They have done a wonderful job.
In a fun piece Pages broke what I hadn’t realised felt like a rule – that the dancer doesn’t speak or sing. She sort of rapped a whole section, a sassy, funny choreography with the women in silk kimonos facing off with the men in suits over who could dance better, then coming together to follow their leader Pages. I couldn’t understand the story, but it was enjoyable and Pages both sent up castanet-playing and also made it seem fun and effortless.
In Pages’ final piece she demonstrated complete mastery of the mantilla, and showed exactly what long limbs are made for. I’ve often seen dancers fumble a little with the enormous scarf, but Pages handled it as if it was an extension of herself. And yet… and yet… I could appreciate the mastery, but I just wasn’t moved. And for me this summed up the whole evening.
It wasn’t helped by the fact that throughout the show I could hardly hear her footwork at all – the band were too loud, and pretty much all her footwork was lost. I can’t believe for a minute that a performer of this standard would have muddy footwork, so it was a shame that the too-loud music made it seem so.
Apart from Ana Ramon’s singing, I didn’t get a taste of duende tonight. But as a self-portrait, it definitely succeeded. I left feeling like I’d looked into the mirror with Pages and had a sense of the shape of her, inside and out. I need to find my own shape, but it’s good to know that there’s definitely room for a 5’11″ one.
