An interview with...

Part 4 of 4

She's going to be the dancer. But I can't teach her. I try to teach her and she thinks I'm crazy. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," my daughter says and she walks away. It's very hard and I now understand when I used to teach in Mexico, one of the teachers had a baby and it was a girl, so when the baby turned two, she said, "Can you teach her?"

And I said, "She could learn with you."

And she says, "No, she will not learn anything with me! She won't do it."

I said that my [future] daughter would learn dancing from me. And she says, "Yeah...you'll see."

And now I realize she's right. My son likes guitar--he's going to be a guitarrista.

When you first came here to DC, was it a little disappointing at first?

At first, but [now] I like it especially when we're doing restaurants. (laughs) It was wierd to dance right in somebody's face and then you see the chimichangas (a Mexican dish) passing by and I'm thinking, "What is this?"

But it was a great experience. You get to dance with a lot of people and live guitarristas. I like that part. I didn't like to do school shows. But I was doing school shows everyday and also doing the restaurants.

When we used to perform, I always missed the [quality of the] theatre [in Guadalajara]. Everything had to be fixed. Big stages, big scenography, big...what do the call the back? They used to put everything that you need for a show, the props and everything. It was unbelievable. That's what I do miss. And someday I'll do that when I have my own company and I'll have a lot of money. (laughs)

If I had to live by flamenco, if I had to live by doing shows, I'd be dead. It's very hard, especially here. There's a lot of competition here. There are a lot of things going on. I know there's a lot in New York, but not in New Jersey. I'm going to start all over..a new beginning.

There are so few guitarists here that even if you can barely do what it is you have to do, they'll say 'Good you're ready,' and they'll push you onstage.

That's true That's one thing I don't like is when you just learned a dance and they say, "OK, you're ready to do a show." It doesn't look good. Everybody know how to do Sevillanas (a popular couple dance). But then you're talking about Alegrías, Seguiriyas (flamenco dances) or something major you can't just go and dance. You have to have the technique, you have to have the feeling, and you need to know what you're doing.

People dance now and they don't know anything about flamenco. They think that you just learn a dance [choreography] and you perform it. You don't just learn choreographies. I can teach so many choreographies. I have thousands of choreographies I can teach but I'm not going to do it. Because I see students that don't even know how to do the arms and the body and the head. There are teachers that are just teaching dance, teaching choreographies, that's it. You come to class and you don't even warm up. It's not right.

So do you have some last words to say to the DC Flamenco community?

Hasta la vista, baby. I'm coming back! (laughs) I'm not leaving yet. I'll be here. It's hard for me to put in words in English and think in Spanish. It's not how many dances you can do. It's how you're going to do it, how are you going to perform, how are you going to try to go inside the dance, the music. So girls, everybody, take technique classes. Don't just learn the dances only. Take my workshops. (laughs)

~END

[Editor's note: Stay tuned for further excerpts. In the meantime, visit Alma's website at http://hometown.aol.com/flamenco99/page/index.htm]