Ser, Sergio Bernal Dance Company ★★★✩✩
Director: Sergio Bernal. Co-direction: Ricardo Cue. Choreographies: Sergio Bernal, with participations by Ricardo Cue, José Manuel Álvarez and José Manuel Benítez. Performers: Sergio Bernal, José Manuel Benítez, Cristina Cazorla, Ana Sophia Scheller (dance); Cruz Díez Orchestra, Paz de Manuel (singing), Javier Valdunciel (percussion). Place and date: Teatre Victòria (2 and 3/5/2024)
The Rosalía effect could be reaching dance thanks to Sergio Bernal. The accusations of intrusion that Sant Esteve de ses Rovires had to endure from the flamenco world, especially with its subsequent reggaeton drift, were thrown at the artist's back, as the former figure of the National Ballet of Spain is saintly doing now with his show Ser, a show in which the Madrid dancer, the mainstream face of Spanish dance today, searches for himself through everything that stimulates him, be it flamenco, ballet or that stylized dance that Antonio Najarro taught him. He taught us to connect with the musical and the Broadway style.
His Barcelona solo debut - with his own company - took four years to produce, but it was worth the wait. In its only two performances that have taken place this week, the Teatre Victòria has been literally taken over by an audience that is perhaps more attracted by the spectacle - a trademark of the Mago Pop theater - than by the dance, although equally respectful, silent... and effusive at the end of the show.
Bernal has been reigning in his own Olympus for years. His image precedes him, but it is now, with Being, when he is giving free rein to his irresistible angel. At least in specific moments of the show, like that overwhelming beginning with music by Coetus, the traditional percussion band, followed by the most sophisticated percussive and wind machinery contained in the instrumental Bzzzz Drumline by Beyoncé...
It is on those ancestral beats that Bernal creates a few memorable minutes of dance. Not for nothing, because they come from his soul. He transmutes into Michael Jackson, demonstrates how flamenco the King of Pop was and follows in his wake to Fred Astaire, father of all that apparent lightness and elegance of tap dancing. And he does it by introducing clear attitudes, grand jetés or impeccable balletic piruettes.
Bernal flows, floats, crumbles in that authentic celebration of dance. And perhaps that is why the rest of his show seems more like a succession of numbers of different styles that fail to reach the initial climax: he performs sketches of a sparse ballet in neoclassical vocabulary - including Ricardo Cue's choreography of the death of the swan-, now flamenco paintings in which the slightly swinging hips reveal that Bernal is a very fine and beautiful dancer from the school, not from the tablao. Until returning to what could have been an eloquent party finale... when the artist covers his naked torso with a vest and pretends to start dancing to Stromae's disco music.
Too bad about the restraint: Bernal does not risk losing elegance and curbs those horses of seduction that are activated when his body moves impelled by an internal motor. He greets his audience, blows them a kiss, and is torn between humility and brilliance. And after just over an hour of the show, he doesn't get out of control. He simply greets with his company, which is not scarce: musicians from the Cruz Díez orchestra, the fabulous singer Paz de Manuel, the guitar of Daniel Jurado...
And also those dance partners of his: José Manuel Benítez, Cristina Cazorla and the Argentine Ana Sophia Scheller, who in turn has been the artistic director of the Kiev Ballet since the war broke out in Ukraine. With it, Sergio Bernal faces those classic moments with music by Max Richter, from the Vivaldi Four Seasons to I Will Not Forget You, soundtrack of the British film Testament of Youth.
That's how varied the artist's self-portrait that Bernal proposes in Being is. A somewhat disjointed cartography of contemporary culture that accompanies a young man of his time, although the public is easily trapped in it, hypnotized by the almost involuntary magnetism of an Apollo. whose hallmark remains discretion.
“Here we have come to share,” the artist said in the dressing room, patient with the fans who congratulated him and asked to be in the photo with him. Victòria is already in negotiations with him to extend this tour that has definitely been too little. It is very possible that he will return to Barcelona in the summer, who knows if his proposal has matured a little more, and with Victòria correcting the flagrant absence of a hand program. For the moment, we keep that performance warm in our memory with flamenco boots, glitter frills and a hat, whose wings frame Bernal's hands without barely touching them... like Jasckson did, like Astaire did... and like a true Tío Pepe of the dance
