Flamenco shows at Las Tapas (in Old Town Alexandria) are on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights. Call 703-836-4000.

Just a couple of quick updates on the local scene:

Flamenco is back at El Manantial in Reston, Virginia starting this Saturday around 7pm and 8:30pm. Call 703-742-6466 to make reservations and confirm showtimes.

For those of you coming out to my flamenco show at Cafe Citron on Saturday nights at 7pm and 8pm, please remember to call ahead at 202-530-8844 and reserve a table by the stage for the best view.

This Sunday January 31st, Things To Do DC is hosting Taste of Spain: Dinner and Flamenco Dance Show at Las Tapas featuring guitarist Miguelito with dancers Sarah Hart and Ginette Perea.

On Friday February 5th, International Club of DC is hosting An Evening in Madrid: Flamenco Dance Performance at Cafe Citron.

Also on February 5th, local dancers Sara Jerez and Ana Martínez are giving dance workshops for beginners on the stage of Lisner Auditorium as part of the 10th Annual Flamenco Festival.

On Monday February 8th, the Corcoran Gallery is hosting Dressed to Dance "a unique, live runway show and simultaneous dance performance showcasing a selection of historic and modern avant-garde Spanish dance costumes."

Lisner Auditorium's 10th Annual Flamenco Festival officially begins on Tuesday February 9th in Gala Flamenca featuring Pastora Galván, Manuel Liñán, Belén López and Roc’o Molina.

Anna Menéndez teaches at the American Dance Institute in Rockville, Maryland.

I hope you enjoyed the pics. That's all for now.

Saturday Night Flamenco at Cafe Citron. January 23, 2010

January 24, 2010 It's Sunday around 5-something pm as I type these words. Seems to be my ritual on Sundays now to blog at my neighborhood Barnes and Noble. It has everything I need: free WiFi, delicious coffee and the occasional distraction of interesting books, magazines and pretty girls.

About last night...so far my efforts promoting the Saturday flamenco show at Citron are paying off: besides the announcements in my blog, website and Facebook status updates, I also tweet regularly. Still…other than seeing the end result of filling Citron with customers every Saturday, it's hard to track the success of my online publicity campaign. But guess what? Last week, I did meet two people who told me they heard about my shows via Twitter!

Last night, however, we didn't pack the place until the second show. There are all kinds of factors that come into play: the weather, traffic delays, competing events around the same time, who knows? But it seems that we're always pushing the showtime later as we wait for customers to arrive in time for their table reservations.

Thankfully, it so happened that my dancer for the evening, Emily Mazzotti, was celebrating her birthday so a bunch of flamenco friends showed up—mostly dancers. Cajón player Jason Vera y Aragón even joined us onstage! (Thanks Jason!)

One minor problem with having the show in the back dining area is that the number of available seats is very limited. If people arrive for dinner and the flamenco show, without a reservation they usually end up being seated in the booths further back where the view of the stage is obstructed.

So I was toying with the idea of installing a video camera focused on my stage and projecting a live video of the show on a large screen for the rest of the club to see. Citron uses a projector by Optoma. So all I need to do is buy a video camera (but which one?) and the appropriate cable or can I do this wirelessly? If anyone out there has experience setting up a live video feed, email me!

For now, in addition to the shows on stage, we might continue to do what we tried out the previous week: perform Sevillanas for the customers seated in the booths area. We just did one copla each for each table. I played the guitar "unplugged" and strolled alongside Sara Jerez as she danced and played the castanets. The customers loved it. And at the very least they got to see what they came for: a live dance show, albeit a short one.

For the first eight years that I performed at Citron, we always had live cante by singer Gerard Moreno and for a short while with José Oretea. But when the economy took a dive last year, we had to cut the budget slightly and cut back the performers to just guitarist and dancer.

Of course I've been doing shows for a long time without a singer in many different venues, but after having live cante in the show at Citron for so long, it felt a little strange not to have it anymore. But as they say, "The show must go on!"

I'm hoping that at some point in the near future, we'll bring back a singer into the show. We'll see. But for now, in a way, not having a singer, does give me the opportunity to grow more as a musician.

Anywayz, so that's my DC flamenco scene stream of thoughts for now. To paraphrase one of my favorite YouTubers PhilipDefranco, "That's all that really mattered to me this Sunday, my name is Miguelito and you've just been filled-in!" Except his name is Phil so "filled-in" sounds like "Phil'd in." Get it? I wanna come up with a clever sign off playing off my name for when I start making YouTube videos on the DC flamenco scene.

My thanks to everyone who came out to my show at Cafe Citron last night. Your support is very much appreciated. Speaking of support, I'm about to head out to Vinoteca to take pics of the rumba/flamenco show featuring guitarists Richard Marlow and José Oretea with dancer Sara Jerez. It starts at 8:00pm and I'm already running late, yikes! See you there!

Saturday Night Flamenco at Cafe Citron. January 16, 2010

January 17, 2010 It's 2-something pm on Sunday as I type these words. Apparently, it seems that a LOT of people had the same idea I had on this rainy day: spend the afternoon sipping coffee at the café and do some work on the laptop. Luckily, a table freed up moments after I arrived.

Anywayz, about last night: the attendance was very good! (I know, I know. I'm an artist and my attention should be focused solely on the quality of the show, but as a struggling self-employed musician I can't neglect the business side of making a living in the arts.) You'd think that being that the show is on Saturday, it should be no problem getting people to come out to my show. Thing is that Citron is a very popular club on the weekends but the insanely large crowds don't arrive until 11:00pm-ish. So it's still my job (and the restaurant's) to somehow get the word out and get people to come in at 7:00pm or 8:00pm on a Saturday night in time for the flamenco.

It's still a better night than Mondays, when the flamenco show used to be scheduled. Although I do take pride in saying that my fellow artists (and there have been many!) and I were able to bring in crowds on Mondays from 2001 to 2009 (that's eight years!) which is traditionally a very difficult night to get people come out!

So last night, all the tables next to the stage were reserved for dinner for people who wanted to see the flamenco show (yay!). Also a couple of the booths were reserved too. The first two tables next to stage were occupied by friends of mine, who incidentally were former coworkers from when I had a full-time day job almost ten years ago. Plus I had some friends from my current temp day job! On top of that I had my usual group of flamenco friends in the audience too! Thanks everyone for your support!

But still, there were quite a few faces I didn't recognize, and that's a good thing! We're bringing in new people, yay! I did take time to meet some of these new people, told them about my website etc etc. Hopefully they'll be back again and they'll bring in more new faces. We'll see in the coming weeks.

The first four pics you see here were taken by friend Steve Johnson, who was playing with his new Nikon DSLR that he got himself for Christmas. Good job Steve! I asked him for a few more details about his new toy. He writes:

"The camera is a D90, and that lens was a AF-S Nikkor 18-105mm VR. I'm actually excited to come to the next show, because I have a few different lenses I want to try out. I'm still learning the settings with this camera, so different lighting and movement situations like this are great practice. I'm going to buy a AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 in the next week or so, which is supposedly great for low lighting."

The remaining ones you see in this blog, were taken by my friend Jani, who has taken literally hundreds of photos of my shows over the years. Thanks Jani! He used my Canon S3IS. While being a very powerful consumer point-and-shoot, my S3IS has taken lots of abuse from heavy use over the years. It's been dropped, spilled on etc and yes, I did take it with me once while paintballing on a muddy field!

For those of you photographers who want to know what lights I use:
1. Standard flood light 100 watt halogen PAR38 with hot pink gel coming from stage right
2. MBT PAR64 LED cycling through the spectrum from stage left

For those of you haven't been to Cafe Citron to see my flamenco show the past few Saturdays, I hope these pics give you some idea of what it's like. Just bear in mind, that unlike before, you need to reserve a table near the stage to get the best view of the show. Last night, most of the tables near the stage were reserved a week in advance! So if you plan on coming, do yourself a favor and make your reservation NOW! The number is 202-530-8844.

Sara Jerez is the regular dancer here and she has quite a following, but she will be sending alternate dancers from time to time. This coming Saturday, we'll have a guest dancer, but I don't know who that will be yet. I'll announce the name of the guest dancer later this week. Past guests have included Ginette Perea, Sara Hart, Emily Mazzotti, Kyoko, Pam de Ocampo and many more, each of whom have their own hordes of fans!

We did have a special surprise appearance by our dancer friend Anna Menéndez. She happened to be at Citron celebrating a birthday of a special someone: her husband Tom! And of course, we couldn't resist inviting her to join us onstage for some Sevillanas. If you don't already know, Anna is a very well-known performer and teacher (she teaches at American Dance Institute in Rockville) who has trained quite a few dancers in the DC area!

It's all about customer service right? Well, the people who were seated in the booths were too far away from the stage to see the show. So to sort of make up for it, we did an impromptu serenade at a few individual tables (see pic below). Just one copla of Sevillanas each for three booths. It was kind of spontaneous and the crowd seemed to like it.

Mmm...yeah. I know...I kinda slacked off on my New Year's resolution of blogging at least once a week. I'm behind schedule by one day, so sue me!

In any case, thanks again to everyone who has come out to the flamenco show on Saturdays the past few weeks. I appreciate your support!!!

PS Don't just support me. Checkout all the local flamenco and rumba shows listed in my calendar of events.

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