Duende; Petite Mort;Mediterrania
Duende; Petite Mort; Mediterrania Compania Nacional de Danza Cultural Centre Grand Theatre March 4 (till March 8) Spain's national dance company - flamenco, castanets, a blur of clickety-clacking heels. Right? Wrong.
Forget the cliches. The Compania Nacional de Danza, under artistic director Nacho Duato, has developed into one of the world's most exciting modern dance troupes.
Just as I will never forget the impression left by Jiri Kylian's stunning Nederlands Dans Theatre a decade ago, so Kylian's erstwhile protege, Duato, and his mercurial, liquid choreography leave a raw and lingering brand.
A son of Valencia on Spain's Mediterranean coast, Duato returns from a career as one of Kylian's star performers and choreographers to drag what was a moribund classical ballet company on to the cutting edge of dance.
He eschews the obvious - no mean task given the baggage of flamenco - to evoke instead a Spain where the sun struggles to peek through dark clouds of tension.
Parts of his dance vocabulary bear the unmistakable stamp of his mentor, but the edgy, hard-driving precision of Duato's work mark him as a compelling - if exhausting - original.
Duende is a mossy fresco built over the rich textures of Claude Debussy, sculpted with tender care.
It yields to Kylian's Petite Mort, a short but masterful work set to the strains of Mozart which treads the tightrope between humour and eroticism without toppling into the abyss of bathos.
It is in Mediterrania that Duato's choreographic talents are fully revealed.
He admits his vision of Valencia may seem 'somewhat cold' compared with the sunny reality, but he achieves his aim of going beyond the artifice of costume and tradition to conjure something deeper.
From its elegiac opening to its relentless, percussive climax, he strips away the peel and pith to serve up a feast of the senses.
