By Lauren Smiley

Carola Zertuche remembers the before-and-after moment in her creative life – the ask, 20 years ago, of whether she would lead Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco. “I said wow, every year I’m going to be able to create something new”  – an annual home-season show, a full-stage theater production. Maybe it’s for the best that Zertuche, a flamenco dancer who’d moved to the city from the tablaos of Mexico City and Sevilla, was naïve to the full reality of becoming an artistic director: that office minutiae often rivals the creative work. Of the audacious fortitude required to run an arts organization in San Francisco. Eagerly, Zertuche accepted the helm of the country’s oldest continuously performing flamenco company.

On October 17, Theatre Flamenco will take over the Herbst Theatre, celebrating the company’s 60th anniversary with a production of “De Ayer a Hoy / From Yesterday to Today," Zertuche’s tribute to the company’s former directors.

Adela Clara and Miguel Santos, at center, circa 1984.

Main image: Carola Zertuche. Photo by Fred Aube. Images Courtesy of Theatre Flamenco

Zertuche wasn’t yet alive when the company was founded in 1966 by Adela Clara, a flamenco and Spanish classical dancer who moved west from New York City, staging the first annual production just months before the Summer of Love. Soon, a male dancer from Southern California named Miguel Santos showed up to hand-deliver a flamenco train skirt – a bata de cola – from Spain, where he’d been studying. Santos would become a male lead in the company and would eventually save it from closure by stepping into the artistic director role. (“As long as I’m alive, I’ll keep it alive,” he said in the documentary "My Life in Dance.") For some 40 years, Santos staged Spanish classical and flamenco productions, a debonair figure in sharply cut bolero jackets, sewn by his lifelong partner Bunny.

Theatre Flamenco found a home amid the Bay Area flamenco hub, which had been gaining momentum since the late 1950s, when a tablao-style show kicked off at North Beach’s former Old Spaghetti Factory. Zertuche arrived in the late 1990s to what had blossomed into one of the most vibrant scenes outside of Spain, with seasoned dancers teaching in the region’s studios and performing a regular cadence of shows. At first, Santos asked Zertuche to choreograph work for Theatre Flamenco’s home seasons, and in 2006, asked her to take the company’s reins.

The nerves of delivering on this year’s milestone are high, Zertuche admits – deepened by the weight of both of the company’s forebears having recently passed: Clara earlier this year, Santos in 2024. “I’m not sleeping,” she told me in late summer after a rehearsal. “Instead of feeling more relaxed” after 20 years, “I feel more responsibility.”

All of us dancers in the show’s corps know the truth as we trot up the steps to Theatre Flamenco’s Mission District studio each week: it is only because of Zertuche’s stubborn pluck that this authentic corner of a global artform still exists in the gentrifying city. So many of her flamenco contemporaries have been forced to flee the untenable cost of living. Through years of studio hopscotch, of Covid-era classes via Zoom, Zertuche has pushed on. Inside the door, we meet a fantasia of flamenco ruffles from the company costume archive festooning the full stretch of the lobby. Tributes from flamenco greats who have performed and taught here —  Eva la Yerbabuena, La Repompilla — are scribbled on the white wall behind the expansive studio floor. Carola arrives daily to practice, to give class, to host a drumbeat of tablaos throughout the year with local and international artists.

Yet it is the theater stage where Zertuche flexes her full artistic vision — where she creates original worlds of images and sound, upending audience expectations, approaching the artform with her curious eye, whether it be a collab with Glide Memorial’s gospel choir, or injecting a flash of heavy metal or cumbia, or transporting the audience to the solitary vastness of the Jordanian desert. Anyone who knows Zertuche knows her pulsing ambition to mount a show as innovative as anything staged in flamenco today.

From left, Cynthia Sanchez, Bianca Rodriguez and Radha Svetnicka. Photo by Christine Fu

This year’s show will reimagine several former works, and present three world premieres. She called longtime collaborator Cristina Hall a San Francisco-bred dancer of exhilarating technical virtuosity and artistry, who moved to Sevilla as a teen to make her life in the artform. One of the city’s most prolific modern dancers, Nol Simonse, will pair with Nevarez Encinias, a flamenco artist from Albuquerque who recently performed with the company while on a fellowship at Stanford, for a male duet, both sensual and monstrous, with the bata de cola — the tail-like skirt whose delivery first brought Miguel Santos to the city. Zertuche cast Adrian Santana, a versatile dancer living in Madrid, whose classic flamenco lines can echo Santos’ signature farruca. Pascual Martinez, Zertuche’s nephew, will add his electronic music to the stylings of Bay Area-based guitarist Jesse Torre and visiting artists from Spain — singer and pianist Diego Amador and singer Amparo Heredia.

With tempestuous grant cycles, Zertuche largely leaned on her own community to support the show, which she hopes to sell out the 900-seat Herbst. Still, she is quick to add that budget constraints have often forged her best ideas over the years: lights from a hardware store transformed into a surprising prop, a tablecloth morphing into a veil, dresses from the archive strung high above the stage.  

In July, she asked our group of veteran students to reimagine a company repertory number danced with the flamenco cane. This time, Zertuche wanted to add two male dancers, and substitute another percussive prop — one more visually arresting for the expansive scale of the Herbst. At an early rehearsal, she scanned the result and made a quick adjustment: each dancer handling not one, but two, of this dramatic prop would open a broader kaleidoscope of movement. The number would take on a tribal, martial intensity and conceptual depth, riffing on a prior season’s theme of separation and deportation, rendered even more potent by today’s immigration raids. We nodded, enthused about the ambitious change-up. Zertuche was back in her realm — restless, one idea flitting into the next, whisking material from Theatre Flamenco’s long history into its continuing evolution, and ours.  

Theatre Flamenco's “De Ayer a Hoy / From Yesterday to Today"
Saturday, October 17, 2026. Herbst Theater, San Francisco.
Performance at 7:30 p.m. Gala to follow at 9:30 p.m.
Tickets and information

Lauren Smiley is a San Francisco–based journalist who has contributed to Wired, New York magazine, and the Atlantic. She is also a student of flamenco, having studied and performed with Theatre Flamenco since 2007.