Museo Del Grito

Higher Ground
Sun 25 March
season ended


With dancers prone and still on the floor an elaborate and dramatic scene awaited the audience for the ambitious, bizarre Museo Del Grito, developed by local collective Velado Flamenco. The narrator (a bespectacled Alirio Zavarce) welcomed us to the Museo and the introduction to the action was akin to the professor's role in the Rocky Horror Picture Show - an air of mystery and sensual intrigue. Zavarce muses, with the veneer of scientific investigation, on the question of woman, and the similarities with Rocky end there!

The first dance is not what we think of as flamenco. The gypsy Solar (Roshane Wijeyeratne) enters the stage bare foot, clenched in orange satin with ankle bells, alluding to the origins of the form. The three others dancers move around her forming sensual gates and fences as they wield their long staffs. 'The Plague Of Sand' demonstrates what continues through the show - the use of a range of dance styles to express the form and render the characters. Modern dance motifs are used in combination with flamenco accompanied by contemporary classical and popular music, including Arvo Part and the Cocteau twins to challenging effect in 'The Mermaid Exhibit'.

Each vignette is imbued with character and symbolism, each dancer in the collective playing out the power, the passion, the complications of women. The use of props aids in this lush production, and it is like no other show Velada have tackled. The magical narrative, conceived by Velada Flamenco member Yasmin Nicholls gives a dreamlike layer. The costuming is, as ever, used as an elaborate tool whether it be for the flowing Mermaid (Nicholls) or the trick top which morphs into red silken binds for the Woman at the Station (Amelia Barnes) or the marvellous update on the shawl dance (Holly Markwell).

'Museo Del Grito' is a mesmerising show. At times the heavy symbolist tales were too dense to make sense of, at which point the dance would take over, always inventive and dazzling.

Narelle Walker