NEW YORK, NY.- In the hothouse atmosphere of flamenco dance, where passionate display of the self is prized, divas abound. But Carlota Santana isn’t one of them.

“I’m not a fantastic flamenco dancer,” she said recently. “I know that, and I think other people know that, too.”

And yet she has accomplished something worth showing off: She has kept a flamenco company going in the United States for 40 years. Such longevity is extremely unusual, but so is Santana’s approach. Although her name is part of her company’s, Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana, it’s no accident that flamenco comes first. She isn’t the star performer. She isn’t the choreographer either. “It’s about the art form,” she said.

That self-effacing focus can be a little confusing. Because Santana no longer performs and never choreographed, her company has long lacked the clear identity — the defining artistic signature — of a choreographer-led troupe. Over the years, as dancers and dance-makers have cycled through, Flamenco Vivo has often seemed to be a different company with each appearance: now pathbreaking and high-quality, now tame or generic.

The incarnation performing in the company’s anniversary season at the Joyce Theater this week is on the high-quality side, led by the Spanish dancer and choreographer Emilio Ochando. Much of the cast overlaps with that of “Fronteras,” the acclaimed show the company brought to the Joyce last year. But, characteristically, it also includes different guest stars, including the esteemed dancer Maria Bermudez, who first performed with group in the 1980s.

Where in all of this is Santana? “She’s the one who makes everything happen,” Bermudez said.

It’s been like that from the start. The troupe began life in New York City, in 1983, as Spanish Dance Arts Company, led by Roberto Lorca, a choreographer from California. Santana, born in upstate New York, had recently given up a career as a psychiatric social worker when she fell in love with Spanish dance and went to Spain to study. Back in New York, she took Lorca’s dance class and became his dance partner. Together, they decided to form Spanish Dance Arts Company. “We wanted people to feel what we felt about the dance,” she said.

Santana asked the dancer Maria Benitez, who had founded a flamenco company in 1972, how it was done. Benitez, she said, told her to get a good typewriter.

The advice pointed to Santana’s role. She performed with the new company while Lorca directed and choreographed, but she also wrote the grant applications and filled out the paperwork that made it all possible. And after Lorca died of AIDS, in 1987, Santana continued in this role, bringing in others to choreograph, new people every few years (and eventually settling on the group’s current name).




Flamenco Vivo became an organization rather than just a dance company. From the beginning, Santana was dedicated to arts in education. Flamenco Vivo now teaches workshops in dozens of New York City schools and in North Carolina, where Santana lives part time, periodically teaching flamenco at Duke University.

More recently, Flamenco Vivo has expanded its education of preprofessional flamenco dancers. A relationship with a prestigious competition in Madrid, el Certamen de Coreografía de Danza Española y Flamenco, led to the founding of a New York version that combines training with prizes. (I once served as an unpaid judge.)

Where in New York City can such dancers rehearse? Not many studios allow hard-soled shoes to hammer their floors. In 2009, Flamenco Vivo converted two rented squash courts on the top floor of what used to be the Columbia University Club in Midtown Manhattan into rehearsal spaces. Far from glamorous, the rooms are among the few places in the city where percussive dancers are welcome. Tap dancers and Mexican folkloric troupes sometimes rent the studios, bringing the company income, but a plaque on the wall proudly states “By Flamencos, For Flamencos.”

This is where the company was rehearsing last week, while Santana was still in North Carolina. Ochando ran the mostly Spanish dancers through his intricate group choreography.

“She loves to make opportunities,” he said. When he tells Santana his ideas, he added, she doesn’t substitute hers; she figures out how to realize his. “This isn’t normal” for directors, he said.

Bermudez, also there rehearsing, said that Santana “seems very cut and dry, very practical, but what her work reveals is a love and respect and care for the art.”

Bermudez pointed out that while many companies, including her own, specialize in one aspect of flamenco, Flamenco Vivo is “like a fan” — displaying a wide range of styles, traditional to modern, and employing an array of practitioners, veteran to up-and-coming. “You never know what you’re going to see, and that’s why audiences keep coming back,” she said.

During her interview, Santana hesitated to reveal where she was born — “when I started, you had to be born in a cave in Granada,” she said — or the age at which she started dancing: her late 20s. This was an expression of anxiety about being taken seriously in flamenco. But 40 years is an indisputably serious figure.

They also serve who make things happen.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.