Berkeley, San Francisco hosting flamenco festival

For Oakland's Nina Menendez, finding her calling within a colorful blend of music and culture was almost unavoidable.

Her mother, Barbara Dane, is a singer, and her father, Byron Menendez, ran a nightclub in San Francisco's North Beach. Her paternal grandparents were from Spain, and as she grew older, her curiosity about Spanish culture also grew.

"All of that contributed to my being very interested in music from Spain," she said. "I had the chance to meet quite a few guitarists and dancers who had been to Spain and were part of a vibrant flamenco scene that had emerged in San Francisco." Her desire to keep flamenco alive and well "developed from the fact that I have this deep love." In 2004, she founded The Bay Area Flamenco Partnership, which will host the Bay Area Festival of Flamenco Arts & Traditions from June 15-20.

One of the festival's two headliners, Manuela Carrasco, "The Queen of Flamenco," has not performed in the Bay Area for decades. Carrasco will join her 10-member company for a June 15 appearance at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall and host workshops in San Francisco throughout the week. Another flamenco legend, Manuel Agujetas, will appear June 19 at the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley.

The 54-year-old Menendez, a University of Havana graduate who lives near Montclair, has long been a student of Hispanic cultures. She received a doctorate from Stanford University and taught there while doing her graduate work. She

She started singing flamenco in her late teens but didn't take it seriously until her 20s, when she met a number of important mentors, including Oakland guitarist and flamenco aficionado Agustin Rios de Moron, who originally hails from Andalusia. She also counts performers David Serva and Ansonini del Puerto of Berkeley as mentors.

Eventually, Menendez traveled to Spain and came to know people in the Roma community who were working to preserve the flamenco tradition. It was then that she first noticed how much she enjoyed producing.

"I saw that I had the skills to be able to make it possible," she said of efforts to raise awareness of flamenco and the gypsy culture in the Bay Area. From then on, she began to host flamenco shows featuring performers from Spain.

"Thanks to the dedicated work of Nina Menendez who has devoted herself to bringing the finest flamenco artists from Spain to the Bay Area, it is now possible to see concerts and attend dance, guitar and cante workshops year-round," said Oakland's Raquel Lopez, who has been a flamenco dancer and teacher for 35 years. "Her service to the flamenco community is invaluable in this respect." Flamenco celebrates the tradition of passing down oral culture through the generations.

"There is a very strong reverence for the elders and the ancestors, and at the same time, it is a form that is very much rooted in charisma and improvisation, an unexpected gesture," Menendez said. "It can go anywhere, from a very humorous approach to a sense of anguish and release." Because flamenco thrives on the idea of artists working together, Menendez strives to ensure there is room for improvisation between artists.

"With the western concept of choreography and modern dance, everything is very highly choreographed and not based as much on spontaneity and improvisation," Menendez said. "We really want to flourish "... by bringing together artists that have special chemistry and by creating an environment in which they feel totally comfortable and at ease."