Sol Picó blends flamenco, ballet and contemporary dance into a heady cocktail of spectacular moves, writes Christine Madden
Like Ireland, Spain endured successive invasions from peoples either friendly or hostile, depending on who writes the histories. Contributing to the fall of the Roman Empire, the Visigoths raided the Iberian peninsula, followed by the Muslims in the 8th century. Although they were defeated and ultimately pushed out by the Christians, the influence of all these peoples remains in the Spanish language, culture and architecture.
With somewhat less violence, Spanish dancer and choreographer Sol Picó has also absorbed and embodied various stylistic influences. The result can be witnessed on stage: an original hybrid of ballet, contemporary and flamenco. As with the vibrant culture of Spain, the different elements work as a refreshing and intoxicating new unity.
"From the age of six, I studied classical ballet," says Picó, clutching a cafe con leche in a quiet corner of a hotel in the southern city of Granada. "I fell in love with it completely. I never wanted to stop dancing. But I realised I was too small to be a dancer of classical ballet" - a genre that requires visual homogeneity in its corps of performers. So she was never going to be a swan, I suggest, referring to the iconic image in Tchaikovsy's famous ballet of the nimble weave and ripple of white tulle-clad ballerinas like a string of identical pearls. No, she says, and jabs repeatedly into the air, her hand a blade measuring the equal heights of imaginary dancers, dipping once to indicate herself, before laughing.
Picó decided to go to Barcelona to study contemporary dance, and then to Paris. She also studied flamenco, the final element of an unlikely trio. Rather than using elements of these disparate styles in her dance, Picó has become the synthesis of all three. "I think the body has a physical memory," she explains. "When I make pieces, all the material I learned appears. It's like a cocktail. The body puts together all the ingredients I learned."
IN HER LATEST PIECE, La Dona Manca o Barbi-superestar, Picó's unique style seems the perfect blend for a piece about the conflicting elements of power and pain that characterises the emotional turmoil women experience today. And, like Picó, La Dona Manca seeks to unite seemingly opposing situations and elements to convey its message.
"A woman today needs a lot of things. She is not a complete woman," Picó believes. "We are living in an important moment, and we have to use it." The title, which translates as "The Maimed Woman or Barbie-Superstar", rather than making a statement, almost presents a choice - which woman are you? Or, as the piece would suggest, which woman are you at this moment? And what about the moment after that?
At the outset, the dancers shift from opulent, fur coat-clad sirens, stalking (and sometimes sliding) up and down an orphaned staircase to a non-existant aircraft, to naked plastic-like dolls juddering awkwardly across the stage and into contact with each other as they play football with the forlorn head of, presumably, a life-size Ken doll, propelling it with a jolt into the goal net.
This is the Valley of the Dolls in the 21st century. These women can satisfy a fickle society only with luxury grooming to maintain their individualism. Without designer clothes, baubles and makeup, they become as anonymous as naked shop-window mannequins.
FAMILIAR TERRITORY FOR Picó, who appeared solo at the 2002 Fringe Festival with Besame el Cactus (Kiss me the Cactus). In this piece, Picó says, "a woman confronts her own fear, fights with her own fear". She created it during a period in which she wanted to work alone, but is now back in group-piece mode. "I spent six months of production with six strong women to arrive at an experience, to put it on the stage," she says. Nevertheless, she doesn't work exclusively with women. Her next piece, currently in production, includes men and bears the wry title Paella Mixta.
Picó herself appears in La Dona Manca as a kind of anti-fairy godmother. The atmosphere of the piece alternates between conditions of empowerment and frailty and, after a section dealing with weakness in which dancers pull themselves and flap across the floor like beached fish, Picó arrives, stabbing into the floor en pointe with her signature crimson ballet shoes.
"Red is my colour," says Picó, in explanation of this most potent symbol of her hybrid style. "I use these shoes to investigate, to put flamenco spirit into pointe." It's not easy to marry the two. "In classical ballet en pointe, the movement is always up. With flamenco, it goes down, the stomach goes down. It's hard on the body. You need very strong legs and ankles, to have a special form. Not everybody can do it." Only one other dancer of the six in La Dona Manca joins her in the flamenco en pointe.
The jabbing of the pointe into the floor recreates the movement, rhythm and sound of flamenco - while at the same time re-inforcing the idea of a maimed woman. Picó, with her red shoes en pointe jabbing a flamenco pulse into the floor, almost resembles the Chinese woman whose feet were bound to indicate status and wealth - maimed women of another era. With the difference that, instead of diffidence, she radiates power and energy.
La Dona Manca has already toured widely, garnering praise from critics in France and Germany, as well as Spain. It ends on a chilling note, the abandoned stairs giving visual emphasis to the idea of an endless journey. . "I think women in society are like that," says Picó. "They keep searching, but they don't get what they want. But I think it's like that for men, too."
She also continues to search through dance to make sense of the world. "I do things I feel - love, fear, wisdom. The most basic thing is life."
La Dona Manca o Barbi-superestar, performed by the Sol Picó Dance Company, runs at Cork Opera House from January 27th to 29th. www.cork2005.ie www.solpico.com