A Passion for Flamenco

When I arrive at the Entre Flamenco new digs on Bandera Road, Estefania Ramirez proudly offers to give me a tour. At least twice the size of the company’s former quarters, the place is handsomely set up, with two actual studios, men’s and women’s dressing rooms, supporting facilities and even a stage, complete with curtain and a smaller adjacent dressing room. Gloria Trevino’s dance photos adorn all the rooms except the large Studio A, where colorful Spanish shawls hang like paintings on the wall facing the obligatory floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

“These are the shawls we used in our last production. They are so beautiful — why have them sit in a closet when they can provide great decoration with a Spanish feel?” asks Ramirez, who co-founded the Entre Flamenco school and company with her husband, Antonio Granjero. 

A Spanish feel is what this place is all about. Granjero and Ramirez moved here from Spain in the fall of 2009 to a grand welcome by the local dance community. Both are well-known flamenco artists with international experience who, over the years, had developed Alamo City ties as visiting artists and residency leaders as well as performers. They chose to settle here because of the existing interest in flamenco and Spanish dance in general, but also because Granjero — who is from Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain — loves this environment. 

They lost no time establishing a teaching studio that quickly attracted both novices and experienced dancers from near and far. They also dazzled packed houses at the Sterling Houston Theater last December with a high-voltage original show called Flamenco for Four Seasons. With its new, expanded premises, christened the Entre Flamenco Dance Space, the organization not only has room for larger classes now, it can also stage shows under its own roof.

“We’ll be branching out and offering more to the community,” says Ramirez, who looks every bit like the Spanish dancer of everybody’s imagination — svelte, petite, with fine features and black hair pulled back into a bun. “Two years ago we couldn’t have imagined that we would need to expand so soon, but it was pure demand that forced us to move.”

Entre Flamenco now has some 115 adult students and a nine-member professional company and will soon add programs for kids, yoga for dancers and the community and possibly salsa and merengue. But the most exciting additions are the monthly performances, which, for the next couple of months, will feature Flamenco del Sur, a new production partially funded by a grant from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. An “homage to Andalusia,” the show includes a number of dances set to less well-known song types, such as cantes abandolaos, or bandit songs from the craggy limestone hills around Ronda in the Malaga region.