Name: FLAMENCO VIVO CARLOTA SANTANA
Start: 2025-03-19T19:00:00-10:00
Location: 1130 Bethel St, Honolulu, HI, United States, Hawaii 96813

Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana has commissioned Patricia Guerrero, internationally acclaimed flamenco dancer-choreographer and winner of the 2021 Spain National Dance Award, to create QUINTO ELEMENTO (Fifth Element), a new evening-length work set to an original score of live music by Grammy-nominated composer Jose Luis de la Paz. Flamenco Vivo will develop this major new work by Guerrero, an innovative talent hailed as a flamenco artist “of supernatural force, with an incredible interpretive capacity” (DeFlamenco), and present it to US audiences next season.

QUINTO ELEMENTO began as a 20-minute work-in-progress set during Guerrero’s January 2023 residency at the Real Conservatorio de Danza Mariemma in Madrid, Spain. Guerrero will continue developing the work for Flamenco Vivo’s Company of 6 dancers into a fully staged 75-minute choreography exploring the fifth element of the earth: ether, that which we do not see yet is ever-present, the essence that makes up the space around us. By drawing on her deep knowledge of traditional flamenco structure and daringly deconstructing its rules, Guerrero seeks to extract the essence of flamenco itself, its invisible fifth element, and make it tangible to audiences.
Guerrero takes on this artistic task through the bulería, a festive style of flamenco with set structural components. She breaks away from the bulería’s dynamic of order and instead embraces chaos through choreography by abstracting postures, placements, and gestures characteristic of the style and playing with their resulting fragmentation. Extreme juxtaposition will be present throughout the work, the product of experimentation with speed and movement quality––at moments sharp and precise while at others round and volatile. QUINTO ELEMENTO will be characterized by a strange and peculiar beauty, as Guerrero operates beyond what is considered aesthetically correct in an art form that highly values exactitude.
Guerrero’s choreography will be accompanied by an equally thoughtfully crafted musical score composed by Jose Luis de La Paz to bring Guerrero’s full artistic vision of ether to life. In this search for flamenco’s fundamental essence, Quinto Elemento builds from flamenco’s expressive movement language while venturing into creating new movements and challenging its structural format, pushing the art form beyond its currently contained boundaries.