The Beat movement was at the zenith of its influence in the late 1950s when San Francisco embraced flamenco as part of its bohemian cultural patrimony.
The soul-bearing art form from Andalucía offered access to similar destinations as the seminal poetry and novels produced by the Beats. Unfolding in small gatherings centering on cathartic creative acts expressing protean emotion, flamenco performances could strip away life’s quotidian trappings to reveal extraordinary bursts of passion, torment, and beauty.
In their own way, via drugs, jazz, and ecstatic verse, the Beats were seeking a kind of raw authenticity, or duende, an untranslatable Spanish word immortalized in García Lorca’s impressionistic 1933 essay about the aesthetic intrinsic to the Gitano-influenced culture of southern Spain.
Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco was born out of this quest in 1966, and the nation’s oldest flamenco company celebrates its milestone anniversary at Herbst Theatre Oct. 17 with “De Ayer a Hoy/From Yesterday to Today,” a packed production featuring a stellar cast of dancers and musicians from Spain and the US. Duende is on the bill.
Organized by incandescent dancer and choreographer Carola Zertuche, who’s led Theatre Flamenco for 20 years, the evening arrives at a moment when flamenco’s hold here is increasingly precarious.
The most grievous blow came last year with the death of Nina Menendez, a fine flamenco vocalist who founded and ran the Bay Area Flamenco Festival/Festival Flamenco Gitano.
After 15 years of presenting the finest Gitano musicians from Spain at venues around San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, Menendez celebrated the art form’s deep ties to the region with the epic 2019 production “Abanico: 100 Years of Flamenco in the Bay Area” at Cowell Theater in Fort Mason.
Zertuche and Theatre Flamenco featured prominently in the event, and she notes that, with Menendez’s death, “the state of the scene is definitely weaker. People have asked ‘Carola, are you going to do the festival?’ I wish.”
She’s staging “De Ayer a Hoy” with a small corps of volunteers and a grant from the Zellerbach Family Fund augmented by support from her students.
The company’s studio on Van Ness Avenue still thrums with performances, classes and workshops, but many of the dancers “have left San Francisco and the Bay Area because it’s hard to keep going,” Carola said. “Even myself, with this production, I’m thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ But when I’m doing the rehearsal, yes, yes, yes!”
As its name suggests, Saturday’s production explores the company’s legacy while continuing Zertuche’s imperative to expand flamenco’s frontier. The program features three newly commissioned works and six reimagined pieces inspired by the company’s vivid legacy.
Zertuche and Málaga dancer Adrian Santana have co-created a new duet honoring Adela Clara, the founder of Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco.
She also commissioned him to rework 1989’s “Zapateado/Farruca’ by Miguel Santos, the company’s artistic director who handed the reins to Zertuche while continuing to dance well into his 90s (he died in 2024 at 99).
“It’s not like I’m bringing the company into the past,” Zertuche said. “It’s more how it’s changing. I’m not doing exactly the way they used to do it. I was not in that epoch, but watching the video it’s been so interesting to see how it’s been changing through the years.”
The company’s extensive video archives, dating back to the early 1970s, figure prominently in the evening via an installation of video monitors.
Dancers and choreographers who’ve worked closely with Zertuche, including Cristina Hall, Nol Simonse, and Nevarez Encinias are featured prominently, accompanied by powerhouse vocalists Amparo Heredia and José “Cachito” Díaz, who both hail from illustrious flamenco clans.
In many ways, the Herbst production is an extravagant bloom rooted in the work that takes place at 670 South Van Ness Ave., where the walls of upstairs studio are festooned with dresses and outfits from past productions.
Zertuche’s regular performances and workshops present flamenco in an intimate setting, with the audience arrayed in a semi-circle, touching distance from the stage.
“Everything happens here in the studio,” said Zertuche, who was born and raised the northern Mexico city of Torreón and trained in Mexico City. “Cristina came last week and I’m showing the beginning of a piece and we start to connect all the numbers. Sometimes we enjoy the rehearsal more than the performance. The process of creation.
The relationship with Cristina Hall has been an important thread running through Zertuche’s tenure as Theatre Flamenco’s artistic director.
Hall was a standout teenage dancer with the Virginia Iglesias Flamenco Dance Company in the early aughts, when they met at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival and Zertuche suggested they work together. They first presented work together at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts with Melissa Cruz.
“And, ever since then, it has been really creative,” Zertuche said. “We understand each other really well. Anything I ask her, she’s not afraid. We did the milonga barefoot around 2010. Why wear the shoes if we’re not doing footwork? Okay, let’s dance barefoot. Sometimes we think flamenco has to be one way. But it doesn’t. We always respect flamenco. The singing is the most important. But every show we’ve done is totally different.”
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