Flamenco is a paradoxical art, requiring passion and control, self-assertion and self-abnegation, physical vehemence and delicacy, defiance and surrender, joy and despair. Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the very few dance forms that prize maturity. It takes a long time, and great self-knowledge, to encompass and integrate these emotional and physical extremes — not to mention mastering the form’s highly codified rhythms.
Sonia Sanchez goes beyond that in “Le Ca” (“The Id”). A Spanish flamenco dancer making her North American debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the Chicago Flamenco Festival, she’s also a student of butoh. And “Le Ca” experiments with flamenco, particularly its sounds, to pose philosophical questions: How do we perceive? How do we know? How do we give meaning to meaningless existence?
Performing with singer El Londro (Miguel Angel Soto Pena) and avant-garde electric guitarist David Soler, Sanchez doesn’t always entertain. She doesn’t answer these questions, but the asking is enough.
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Mind games pervade “Le Ca,” which opens in almost complete darkness, though we can hear what seem to be the sounds of distant steps. Later, when we can both see and hear Sanchez’s fluttering and pounding steps, live sound artist Ander Agudo captures and manipulates those sounds and layers them over what’s happening onstage, creating electronic echoes at odds with our sight.
The dark stage of “Le Ca” not only compromises vision but also emphasizes the value of obscurity and introspection, isolation. Sanchez enters the space in a glacially slow and faltering walk, barefoot, hanging forward from the waist, head near the floor, hair falling in a curtain that obscures her face. The artist must look inside first. Slowly her arms, stiffly extended behind her back, come to life.
After that, all of Sanchez comes to intense life, in an early barefoot display of footwork and in more-traditional sequences in flamenco shoes, notably the section accompanied only by the manipulated echoes of her footsteps. Breathtaking control allows her to shift in a nano-second from furious stamping to a suspended, soundless ordinary step, and to walk in exquisite slow motion. Sanchez’s large hands move so intricately and eloquently they become little dancers in themselves.
“Le Ca” can be challenging, but its obscurity is lightened by the rapport between Sanchez and wonderfully nuanced singer Soto Pena as they share rhythms — trading palmas (hand claps) and the full-foot stamping of golpes — and occasionally come close. Unfortunately, guitarist Soler feels isolated, producing arrhythmic bursts of noise and futzing distractingly with his many foot pedals. At those points, the sublime energy of “Le Ca” drops precipitously.
3.5 STARS
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago
Running time: 70 minutes
Tickets: $28 at 312-397-4010 or mcachicago.org