Missed Connections in Flamenco Ode to Love

Very late in the theater piece “Amar es Olvidar La Vida” (To Love Is to Forget Life) at the Los Angeles Theatre Center on Friday, an anguished scream from actor-dancer Robert Alvarez morphed into a classic, flamenco wail of pain coming from singer Jesus (‘El Genio Gitano”) Montoya.

This sudden transformation represented one of the few occasions when the nonlinear, 75-minute meditation on the loss of youth and love used its continual juxtapositions of speech and song, drama and dance to reach an emotional flash point or fused its component idioms successfully.

Otherwise, “Amar es Olvidar La Vida” ricocheted from one discipline and literary source to another, incorporating texts and themes credited to Emily Bronte, Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, William Shakespeare and the Kamasutra, plus as many acting styles. Diverting, but ultimately a preliminary sketchbook rather than a finished creation.

Intended to connect the disparate elements: Alvarez as a streetwise, contemporary angel, initially a witness to the follies of human love but eventually engulfed and destroyed by it. The dance passages contrasted his freestyle turns and limber contortions with the more grounded flamenco attack of Laila del Monte, who conceived and directed the production.

Unfortunately, these playoffs went nowhere and Del Monte gave herself only one major solo--a showpiece she choreographed that proved so memorable for its intense, complex heel-work and eloquent body sculpture that it made the company’s play-acting seem all the more expendable.

Her husband, Adam del Monte, composed the score, enlisting Montoya’s powerful vocalism, the mournful lyric cello of Giovanna Moraga and his own spectacular refinement as a guitarist. During his wife’s big “Desdemona” solo, his transformation of the guitar into something akin to a distant, insistent funeral drum not only prefigured her character’s violent fate but also justified using amplification in so intimate a venue.

Actors Jean-Louis Darville, Anna Lluch and Jaime Martin were also featured in this Fountain Theatre presentation, with the charismatic Darville especially prominent in a wide range of roles and Martin listed as “theatrical director.”