Noche Flamenca, the beloved flamenco troupe, can eschew spectacle and concepts for a simple presentation, because it can rely on its dependably thrilling star, Soledad Barrio. In recent years, though, the group has grown a little more theatrically ambitious, and a new pattern has emerged: longer works that take a season or two to find their footing.
That’s what happened with “Antigona,” its flamenco adaptation of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” which debuted in puzzling pieces at the Joyce Theater in 2014 but largely came together a year later for well-received runs at the West Park Presbyterian Church. The troupe’s five-week season at the church opened Monday with two new pieces, “La Ronde” and “Creación,” and these continue the company habit of gradual improvement. (“Antigona” returns Jan. 10.)
When a version of “La Ronde” debuted at Joe’s Pub in March, its structure of short, interlocking duets seemed flattening — just one thing after another. But the piece has acquired dramatic shape. It borrows its title and form from Arthur Schnitzler’s play, a chain of sexual liaisons in which one character from each scene appears with a new lover in the next. The Noche Flamenca version isn’t strict about the linkages, and it isn’t a danced play, but the mutability of desire is nevertheless evoked.
The dancer Marina Elana establishes the idea, flirting over her shoulder with a guitarist. She opens herself up to him, yet he leaves, and her flirtation with the next guitarist is tougher, crueler; this time, she’s the one to go. Later, the dancer Jeanne d’Arc Casas arrives, lonely and dejected in a traditional long-tailed dress. Her self-circling, chasing her own tail, is a poignant image, its own sad cycle of hope and despair. And the pain of that circling heats her subsequent duet with the singer Emilio Florido; she takes his castanets, and probably his heart and pride, too.
Mr. Florido’s reaction injects some rueful humor, but this “La Ronde” doesn’t have much of Schnitzler’s wry Mitteleuropa fatalism. Its emotions are more operatic, closer to a telenovela, especially when Ms. Barrio and the peacocking Juan Ogalla enter the round. The passion isn’t faked, and, as “Antigona” established why flamenco and Greek tragedy should go together, this work finds its own connection to “La Ronde.”
The group’s recent flirtation with hip-hop hasn’t yet arrived at that stage of convincingness. “Creación,” still in its primary developmental stage, puts Ms. Barrio, Ms. Elana and Ms. d’Arc Casas together with the veteran hip-hop dancer TweetBoogie and two skilled backup dancers. The thematic point is still murky, but the piece sort of works as a celebration of female power and solidarity.
TweetBoogie is plenty fierce, and her facial emoting is nearly flamencan. Sweeter in manner than Ms. Barrio, she gamely applied her old-school moves to a traditional, partylike flamenco encore. Pain, defiance, joy: Maybe there’s something to this mixing of genres. Perhaps next season will tell.
A dance review on Wednesday about Noche Flamenca, at the West Park Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, misidentified the dancer who arrives lonely and dejected in “La Ronde.” She is Jeanne d’Arc Casas, not Carmina Cortes. The review also misspelled the surname of a dancer at one point. As the review correctly noted elsewhere, she is Marina Elana, not Elena.