Celebrating 50 years of flamenco
“First of all,” says Carola Zertuche, “flamenco is a way of living. You wake up with flamenco, you eat with flamenco, you sleep with flamenco.” The artistic director of Theatre Flamenco, San Francisco’s venerable school and performing company, emphasizes her points with the tacka-tacka of her heels on the floor or by flicking the lacy train of an imaginary bata de cola, the iconic flamenco dress. This is a woman who is always dancing.
She is also dedicated to exploring the full range of flamenco’s possibilities, from the defining traditions to the burgeoning avant-garde. Fittingly, the company’s 50th anniversary season, titled “El Latir del Tiempo/The Beat of Time” and opening on Friday, Nov. 4, promises to be a celebration of its legacy and a statement of Zertuche’s vision for the future. (The show will also tour Southern California.)
“I think I’m traditional, but some people say that I am modern,” Zertuche says in the company’s airy new Mission District studio. In spite of that conservative selfassessment, she delights in reeling off names like Farruquito, Israel Galván and Rocío Molina, who dance on flamenco’s artistic edge, and in creating works like the genre-bending “Flamenco en Movimiento.”
Zertuche invited contemporary dancer Nol Simonse to collaborate on “Movimiento” for the 2012 season, and attempted to teach him how to dance while wearing the bata. “He never did the technique, he did his own thing,” she says. “The way he interpreted the music — incredible.”
Simonse’s bata work was anything but traditional, and after his duet with Spanish dancer Antonio Arrebola — both in black dresses, pulling the long trains over their heads and twinning — it’s likely that no one saw the garment, or the dance form, in quite the same way.
“She was really willing to press against almost every tradition,” Simonse says. “And the other artists were so amazing. The respect I feel for flamenco artists because of being in that show is so deep.”
“That’s a real hallmark of Carola,” says board member Mecca Billings Nelson. “Not just bringing an artist here to present his or her own work, it’s ‘What can we create together?’ That’s very much like the major festivals in Spain.”
Also like her Spanish contemporaries, Zertuche is adamant that innovation evolves from a mastery of flamenco technique and a sense of its soul. The duality of past and future seems
appropriate to everdisruptive San Francisco, where Zertuche has lived since 1997 and where she met her husband of 16 years, restaurateur Gino Assaf.
Adela Clara founded Theatre Flamenco in 1966, during a renaissance of Latino arts in the city, and it thrived under her successor, Miguel Santos. While they were building the school and company here, Zertuche was a schoolgirl in Guadalajara, Mexico.
“My parents took me to ballet class. I didn’t like it much,” she says. “One time I (left) early and I heard the castanets. I was like, ‘No, no, no, I want to go to this class.’ ”
Every day after school, she would play her father’s flamenco CDs. “It was the deep songs — siguiriyas, soleares. A lot of the siguiriyas are about death,” she says, agreeing that it was unusually heavy listening for an 8-yearold child. “I didn’t understand, I just felt it.”
Years of study with Manolo Vargas in Mexico City laid the foundation of her interpretive approach.
“He taught you how to use your body, about the timing, the space,” she says. “I still remember his words. He said, ‘Carola, go to Spain and study with many, many people, but never copy. You make your own way of dancing.’ ”
Zertuche took his advice, and spent her early 20s performing in Seville tablaos (nightclubs) and studying with artists like Belén Maya and Pedro Azorin. The connections she fostered continue to this day, and among the pillars of her practice is creative exchange with great dancers and musicians throughout the flamenco diaspora.
Renowned dancers Pastora Galván and San Francisco-born Cristina Hall, plus Jerez-style singer Juana la del Pipa, will travel from Spain to perform, and Manuel Gutierrez will come from Los Angeles and Iliana Gomez from the Southwest. Professional musicians and local dancers round out the cast.
Zertuche will revive the ensemble “Zapateado” and her mesmerizing barefoot duet with Hall, “La Milonga.” And in true flamenco spirit, several pieces will be improvised. “That’s another beauty part of flamenco,” she says. “You can dance without knowing each other; and if you have a good connection, it’s like an explosion. It feels like you go to another world.”
On the cusp of her second decade as Theatre Flamenco’s artistic director, Zertuche sees this season as her stake in the ground. “Flamenco now, it is super open,” she says. “In ‘El Latir del Tiempo’ the people will see the beat of time, the tradition — how it is changing, but you keep your timing.”