In 1936, Spain's most celebrated poet and playwright of the century was executed by Fascists at the onset of the Spanish Civil war and buried in an unmarked grave.

At 38, Federico Garcia Lorca had produced an impressive oeuvre of scripts that made him the most important modern Spanish playwrite, and oft-quoted poet.

This weekend, an independently produced dance drama based on Lorca's first play, El maleficio de la mariposa, premieres in Winnipeg as Mariposa — The Butterfly's Evil Spell, featuring Spanish dance, modern dance, live music and surrealistic design.

Mariposa is performed by a cast of seven: flamenco dancer and artistic director Claudia Carolina; flamenco dancer and vocalist Claire Marchand; Spanish classical dancer Maritel Centurion; modern dancer Randy Joynt; flamenco guitarist Peter Mole; cellist Sean Taubner; and percussionist/vocalist Sheila Gosh.

Co-producers Carolina, from Toronto, and Winnipeg's Marchand, who runs the Spanish Dance and Flamenco Academy of Manitoba, read Lorca's play and pared it down to four main characters, all of whom are insects.

"It's kind of charming on one level, but on another level, it's very philosophical and kind of dark, with a sense of pending doom or claustrophobia," says Marchand.

The story is about a beautiful butterfly that falls into a meadow populated by beetles. A poet beetle falls obsessively in love with the wounded creature, almost as if she is an illusion, and as the play progresses, he starts to go increasingly mad.

"That's where the script ended, so we had to devise an ending," says Marchand.

Marchand says the last pages of the play were lost, which is why it was only performed once in Madrid in 1920 — a production that was considered a dismal failure. Lorca, however, went on to write more successful plays and poetry before his untimely end, and was even rumoured to be a lover of surrealist artist Salvador Dali.

"We're actually using a little bit of Lorca's poetry that relates to the play, one of his poems called Desperate Love, for example, or lines from the play."

Marchand says that most people don't understand the difference between classical Spanish dance, which emerged in the Spanish courts and incorporates the vocabulary of flamenco and regional dance styles, and pure flamenco dance, which is a distinctively improvisational form of dance.

"Classical Spanish dance is usually set to Spanish classical music, follows the music very closely, and involves some very subtle castanet technique. In flamenco, the dancer's tempos and calls lead the music, so the guitarist has to follow the dance steps and vocals."