Last Updated Friday February 29, 2008, EST 6:15 AM
Carlota Santana is the grande dame of flamenco, and this year is the 25th anniversary of her company, Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana. In the past quarter century, she's become a standard bearer of the art form in America. Before her upcoming Joyce Theater season, she spoke about the passion that drives her.
Q. What has changed in the years since you founded your company?
When we started in 1983, we were the only company in N.Y.C. doing anything. Now there is much more activity going on. There are festivals. There are other companies that come through. We do lots of arts and education. Young people are learning about flamenco. One of my fantasies is that one of these days there will be a whole bunch of little girls who want to wear dotted dresses as much as they want to wear the tutu and be the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Q. How did you come, initially, to flamenco?
What drew me to flamenco was the ability to express myself. For me, the female flamenco dancer is the most feminine you can get. You can be soft and sweet, and you can be tough and strong. Any emotion you can have, you can express. That's what drew me to flamenco.
Q. One of the new pieces this season, "Carmen: El Baile," is based on the story of Carmen. How is it different from the opera by Georges Bizet?
Carmen, of course, is a legend of a very strong female who runs around seducing men. Our Carmen is also a strong female. She is the epitome of the best flamenco dancer in the whole world, and people want to get her art. So people, in a sense, start seducing her. The men are after her, and are seduced by her, and the women also want to be like her.
A lot of the music is original, and then every once in a while you'll hear Bizet in there. ... The opera's so well known that you can't get away from that. People will hear that, and I think it will remind the audience that this is Carmen. Although I kept saying while we were rehearsing: "This is not Carmen the cigarette girl."
Q. And the choreographer of that piece, Pilar Andujar, is a rising young talent?
One of the missions of the company has also been to give opportunity to young and upcoming dancers and choreographers to do these works. To help develop the art form. There are not that many people choreographing for flamenco, so we're always looking to help people learn how to be choreographers.
Q. What is unique about the flamenco your company does?
My company has been founded with the idea of doing dances with story lines. Most flamenco dances [have] traditionally been just dances without a story line. It's more interesting for us and more challenging.
Q. You've also used elements of Latin American music and dance in your pieces. Are there similarities between flamenco and those cultural traditions?
Since the days of Columbus they've gone back and forth between Spain and Latin America. There's been a mixture. ... And now in the world of Internet, there's influences of everybody on everything.
Q. When you consult older members of the flamenco community, what do they say about your new approaches?
In flamenco there are the purists who say this should not be done: It's losing its feeling. It's losing its tradition.
And there are those who say, because the world has gotten so small, and because there is now so much available to us, we want to do these new things, and we want to experiment. We want to push the envelope. We feel that this is a way to make the art form expand. And we don't lose the tradition; we still carry it with us.
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com
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