The ingredients are simple - like a recipe requiring just 500 grammes of Beluga caviar and a magnum of Dom Perignon. Take four tremendous flamenco dancers, a superb guitar soloist, two blazing singers, two fine guitarists, a saxophonist (this is the bit I'd omit) and minimal staging. Call it The Four Elements, and serve on Sadler's Wells stage without an interval for 80 minutes. Result: theatrical bliss.

So it proved at the opening of the Wells' Flamenco Festival. Of course, the dancers are the thing, and magnificent - admirably contrasted, vastly in command of their art. Each represented an element: the young and gifted Rocio Molina was Water, with the dance flooding, curling through her; Alejandro Granados was Earth, harsh as a sun-hardened plain, and as nobly uncompromising; Carlos Rodriguez was Air, light and fast, whirling the dance through his body and producing marvels of step and drumming heels. And Carmen Cortés was Fire.

I fell in love with this great dancer's art a decade ago. Here is flamenco at its most proud and elemental. Dressed in red fringing Cortés appears, and at the behest of guitars and voices she starts to move. She stands, monolithic in pose, then the dance takes hold. Her daemon possesses her, "the god," as Isadora Duncan said of great performance, "is with her".

Arms flail, feet stamp and shuffle, her dress flickers, she smiles, grimaces, bends head and trunk: movement is born of the songs that are goading her, impelled by the guitars. She is as elemental as fire, a divinity. (There is a small statue of Diana of the Ephesians, Earth Mother, in the Vatican Museum, which commands all the space around it. Carmen Cortés, inhabited by the dance, has the same prodigious effect.) Rarely can we see artistry of this calibre: we are privileged.

Gerardo Núñez plays a dazzling guitar solo. The two singers and two guitarists are admirably good. The staging is unobtrusive. A wonderful evening, wonderful flamenco.

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