Bench understatement fashion show

Where disdain meets seduction

You don't have to look far to find flamenco in southern Spain. On a bench in a shady square near my Seville hotel even the dossers are at it in their fashion, one of them crooning in a scratchy voice while another two provide an accompaniment of rhythmic clapping. I remember once hearing a Spanish musician in London explaining the scheme of counting involved in flamenco - a complex affair involving cycles of rhythms each repeated x number of times according to the form of the song. The idea that anyone could keep a grip on these logistics when not 100 per cent sober only confirms my suspicion that the essence of flamenco is something Spaniards imbibe with mother's milk - even if later they progress to something stronger.

Two months ago the theatre director Jude Kelly was a self- confessed flamenco virgin. She knew no more than that she liked it (though, in her opinion, "that Joaquin what's-his-name hasn't done it any favours, along with all those dreadful dolls you collected as child"). But after accepting an invitation to collaborate on a new music-and-dance show with the guitarist Paco Pena, and after several weeks' rehearsal in Seville, her enthusiasm is verging on evangelical.

I mention the tramps' impromptu offering I witnessed on the way to our interview. "That's just what excites me," she says. "Here is an art form that has a huge amount of classical form about it - it has discipline and rigour, and it doesn't give you a simple good time. It's not at all what you think of as a popular art form, yet it is a popular art form. It operates at a most sophisticated level, but anyone can take part."

"Popular" and "community" have been the buzzwords of Jude Kelly's career, first when she put Battersea Arts Centre on the map as London's first "local" focus for the performing arts, then as founder and artistic director of West Yorkshire Playhouse which she only recently left after 13 years. Why give up a secure job at the top? Because, she says, she has always believed "the most creative place to be is at the bottom of your own learning curve. If you've built up a reputation, in order to progress artistically you have to be prepared to lose it. So here I am in a different country, a different culture, a different form - and that's where the adventure is. I'm learning again." Despite limited experience of flamenco, Kelly has always loved its attitude: the female confidence, the mixture of disdain and seductiveness. "British reserve does have creative aspects to it, but increasingly, I think, British artists acknowledge that the neck-up approach to creativity doesn't give full enough scope for expression," she says, aware that this might be a bit of an understatement.

But none of this quite explains Kelly's out-of-the-blue decision to hitch her skills to those of a Spanish guitarist - albeit one with a global concert career and some of Spain's best young dancers in tow. Again, it's down to the risk factor. "Paco's a mature artist, and he's got this huge reputation, but he doesn't sit on his laurels," she says. "What's exciting to me is that, at 62, you won't hear him saying `I don't do that kind of thing', or `that's not my style'. He's interested in things being modern, even aggressively modern, as long as the integrity is there." The core of the new show, Voces y Ecos (Voices and Echoes), pursues Pena's curiosity as to how the essence of flamenco can find a place in today's world. "Flamenco is about hardship and survival and it's about passion and pain," Kelly goes on. "Yet most artists in the Western world no longer have a first- hand memory of that. So you can either ape that passion in a melodramatic way, or you can find a connection by a different route. You have to maintain this DNA as it travels through the form without fossilising it. That's the challenge." The result is a piece of work that - unlike most flamenco shown on the London stage in recent years - doesn't present a narrative, nor simply reel off a selection of dances and songs. Rather, it's a sequence of scenes that track flamenco's development from its peasant roots by the kitchen hearths of Andalucia into an art form in the cafe cantantes of the 1880s (roughly in parallel with jazz clubs in New Orleans). It then pursues flamenco's first forays into theatres in the 1930s and Forties and on to the latest boom of interest under the influence of professional choreographers and diverse musical genres.

But it's not intended as a history lesson. Paco Pena isn't interested, he says, "in nostalgia for the past, nor in depicting specific periods with great accuracy - even if that were possible to do." As he puts it, rather endearingly, "I'm quite an old person compared to many other artists, so I know about flamenco the way it used to be. And I know flamenco as it is now. My idea is to extract the essential feeling that has inspired artists at different times - to show how, while the style may have varied, the essential voice of flamenco has remained strong." So what made him believe that Jude Kelly might help him realise that vision - a director who knows not two words of Spanish? "To see flamenco from an entirely new angle, the prospect of that delighted me," he says. "Wherever there's a fresh creative eye, that has to be an asset."

`Voces y Ecos': Peacock Theatre, London WC2 (020 7863 8222), to 9 November