The Flamenco Festival under way at Sadler’s Wells leans heavily towards the innovators, those artists trying to drag flamenco kicking and screaming — how else? — into the present day, or to a point later than the culture-knackering blow that was the invention of the package holiday, at any rate. In the Gala de Sevilla that opened the festival, however, the emphasis was on tradition, and the more traditional it got, the better it became. Juan de Juan, who opened the show, is a slight, hyperactive bantam in his mid-twenties. He kept jerking about unpredictably to a staccato crossfire of stamps and claps, as if he had wrapped his body in tinfoil and was cooking popcorn on the heat of his own nervous energy. All he lacked was that crucial hint of gravitas — the suggestion of an assailed but unsurrendered dignity, or hard-earned wisdom, or remembered pain — that might keep his more extreme displays from looking like a temper tantrum.

Rocio Molina, who followed Juan de Juan after a querulous interlude from the singer La Susi, is five years younger but infinitely more tempered by experience, if the dramatic solea she gave here is any guide. Molina has exquisitely expressive arms, squared up fist-to-fist in a carousing, Popeye-like hornpipe one minute, floating bonelessly around her like cigarette smoke the next. She can elaborate a world of emotions in one stately 360-degree turn.

It took the second half of the show, and the appearance of the fortysomething Manuela Carrasco, to suggest that even Molina’s performance was only so much virtuosity, and that flamenco offers something deeper still.

Technically, Carrasco essayed very little compared to what had gone before, but every step, every gesture, had a tigerish, instinctive focus that made it feel absolutely right and lent it the fearful weight of inevitability. For a little while, she lost this predatory exactitude as she was buffeted by the searing voice of Antonio Nuñez Montoya (known as Chocolate). But she soon recovered her poise, and, suddenly, all Federico Garcia Lorca’s poeticising about how flamenco is ancient and mysterious, and springs from the bowels of the earth through the soles of the artist’s feet, began to seem like cold-eyed reportage.

The mystery behind the show that Maria Pages brought to Sadler’s Wells is less compelling, though just as baffling in its own way. What on earth is the idea behind the first half (called El Perro Andaluz. Burlerias), and why has it won so many awards? From the title and the programme note, claiming that the work is inspired by surrealism, we might legitimately expect a dead donkey in a grand piano, or at least a man in a pointy waxed moustache. Instead, there are only 12 dancers, dressed in grey (except for Pages and Angel Muñoz, who daringly opt for black), stomping in unison through a series of dimly lit numbers from which the recklessness and the complex interactive cacophony of flamenco have been mercilessly purged. It only comes alive near the end, when the pre-recorded score (another disappointment) serves up some Tom Waits and the dancers start remembering how to enjoy themselves.

The second half, Flamenco Republic, is less wilfully perverse and consequently much more fun. It features a delightful series of duels between various unlikely percussion instruments, including fans, castanets and walking sticks. Pages and her company have a reputation as innovators, but they — and Muñoz especially — should be careful how much of flamenco’s tradition they attempt to change. After all, in how many art forms is it possible to be a sex symbol with bow legs and Lennie Bennett hair?