An interview with...

Part 2 of 4

I had my primary teacher. Her name is Hilda Prats and my respects to this teacher, but there were always teachers from Spain coming over to our academia such as Chuni Amaya, Queti Clavijo.

Queti is the greatest. Chuni and El Tano, her cantaor husband would come down and she'd do a lot of workshops. Most of the steps that I did for Farruca for the past show with Danza del Río, some of those steps are from Chuni's workshops. And there was also Queti Clavijo who came every summer to teach workshops. My bulerías are from this guy Joaquín Fajardo. He was unbelievable.

We would bring all these people from Spain every summer for workshops so we didn't even have to go to Spain. But after you get the teaching degree, you go to Spain and then you take classes in Jerez, in Catedral de Flamencología. It's the greatest. If you ever go there don't bother going to Madrid.

Well...regarding your primary teacher, Hilda Prats, what was she like as a performer and how was she as a teacher?

She was...she still is an unbelievable performer. She was the niece of the director of the company so she was great...unbelievable. You can never stop looking at her dancing. She had all this technique....well all my technique that I have was from her. With Hilda, everything had to be PER-FECT! It was like, the hips are not here, they're right there. She will stop in the middle of the dance class for one tiny thing. She is great.

I'm happy she chose me first. She came to the class and she picked the best ones for herself. She would select the group for the performances. So she took me when I was...how old was I...maybe four years old.

When I first started at two-and-a-half years, there was no dancing. It was creative movement. You learned how to do the expression and how to play the castanets...we used to play like spiders. We used gloves and made a spider out of it with just the right hand so we were saying things like 'OK, here comes the spider!' (mimics a spider crawling on the table).

And so she comes and says that she'll take this one and that one and so then she took me. And so then I became the...favorita (laughs). Yeah it was really fun because she was very young too. When she started teaching she was about fourteen years old, maybe less, maybe thirteen I think. I think she was thirteen when I was six. So she was very young. And when I grew up and I was twenty years old, she still looked the same. She is great. Unbelievable. Now she's the director of the company.

Were you an average student or above average?

Above average. There were...I'm being honest...three girls counting me: this girl María Antonia, Hilda my teacher and I. So we always did the major roles. And we always did Farrucas. I would always do the roles in pants!

Because we were strong dancers, everybody came to see the show. They'd see me and say "Wow...I want you to teach my girl." And then they would fight because they all wanted their students to take classes with Hilda, María or myself. And I'd say that there are another five teachers here. But I'm the favorita there like I said, which I love (laughs). It's great. You really became very popular. It was fun. It was a lot of fun those days.

So you were there to what age, nineteen?

No, I was about twenty-two years old or twenty-three. I came here [to the DC area] in 1987 and I remember calling Hilda saying, "I'm going to stay here."

She answers, "You can't do that! You cannot stay; you have to say with me!"

Because we had [dance] projects. She would do a lot of things like 'Misa Flamenca' and [for me to be here in DC, for her] it was a big loss.