Among the incalculable horrors of the Holocaust, one of the less well-known facts is that up to half a million Gypsies were among those persecuted and killed. It’s a tragedy that flamenco choreographer Israel Galván has long wanted to address on stage, but also one for which he feared dance might be inadequate. If Lo Real is partly about ethnic cleansing, it’s also partly about the artist’s despair of making sense of it.
On a starkly lit stage, Galván and his cast – two female dancers and a dozen singers and musicians – have the look of a displaced Gypsy community pitched between suffering and survival. Specific references to the work’s historical context are minimal: Galván raises his arm in a Nazi salute, then lets it fall into a flamenco curve; a woman dances between iron rails, as if tracing the train route to her death. There’s old movie footage of a Gypsy dancing for uniformed Nazis. And when the live dancers also perform traditional flamenco, the fact that they are accompanied by references to adverts for bleach and pest control underlines the point that even if the Nazis saw the Gypsies as exotic entertainment, they also considered them vermin.
Galván often makes us work very hard to find these meanings, though. Much of his imagery is too fragmented or opaque to make accessible sense, and the show is essentially held together by his presence. We feel the force of his anger as his formidable dancing fractures into shards of rhythm and shape, or when he assaults a broken piano, clawing and stamping at its strings. It’s the raw charisma of Galván’s performance that keeps us watching; even where Lo Real doesn’t cohere as dance theatre, its integrity is never in doubt.
• At Festival theatre, Edinburgh, until 21 August. Box office: 0131-473 2000.
