She sits on a chair with legs wide, skirt tumbling down like a flame waterfall. The arms are muscular, elbows sharp, hands a belt around a tiny waist. The hips are mobile, the feet impulsive. She leaps and stamps and clucks and yelps. She also seduces - and kills. She is cool grace and femininity on fire. I'm really getting very moist. This is not Morris, this is Flamenco.

This is theatrical dance at its most contemporary, eclectic, parodic, stripped of illusion, the elevation of form over content, full of the ingredients one leasts expects from flamenco. A chorus line of dancers stamp and shoot a leg to the side and swing it behind. They move down the stage in a symphony of toe-jabs, turn around and drive back on wheels of heels and toes, skirts swirling in the puffs of coloured clouds. Everywhere snaking arms set off swaying hips, power legs and pneumatic feet.

Flamenco king Antonio Gades and his company are in London for the first time in 20 years with a stage version of the film they made in 1983 with Carlos Saura. Stalla Arauzo plays Carmen. In Carmen, Gades uniquely realises the full dramatic, choreographic and aesthetic potential of flamenco.