Keeper of flamenco.

The flamenco ballet Federico is Carlota Santana's latest labor of love on behalf of Spanish dance.

Cold winds blew through the ancient Andalusian city of Granada last December at the premiere of Federico, the flamenco ballet that commemorated the tragically short life of Federico Garcia Lorca. The most popular Spanish poet of his generation after World War I, a member of Madrid's artistic elite that included painter Salvador Dali and filmmaker Luis Bunuel, Garcia Lorca had written the classic plays Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernada Alba by the time of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Many historians believe that his homosexuality as well as his Republican politics led to his murder by Franco supporters in 1936. His body was never found.

In spite of the bitter weather, the notables of Granada, including the important Gypsy families from the caves in the hilly environs, filled the Palacio de Congresos for this tribute to the region's beloved native son. But it was an American--not a Spaniard--who had made this commemoration possible. For years Carlota Santana, a New Yorker who heads the fifteen-year-old company, Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana, has looked for an opportunity to produce a flamenco-style tribute to the martyred author. The one-hundredth anniversary of his birth this year was not only a logical inspiration for a work such as Federico, but proved to have a persuasive appeal to backers. In 1996 the National Dance Residency Project blessed the enterprise with $100,000. The New York State Council on the Arts added another $10,000.

"We've been funding Carlota's company since it began," said Beverly D'Anne, director of the dance program at NYSCA. "It's shown such impressive artistic and administrative growth recently that we doubled our grant this year, especially for this project." These gifts made it possible for Santana to premiere the work in Granada; it was later performed in Albuquerque and New York City.

Santana's regular schedule would seem to rule out participation in the production of such a major new work, crammed as it is with classes at her New York City school and with extensive children's programs throughout the country. She has learned to work in all kinds of circumstances, however, after winning her flamenco stripes by performing in Seville and Madrid tablaos, those intimate nightclubs where employment is disorganized, demanding, and underpaid. "I wanted a theatrical piece that captured the soul of Garcia Lorca," Santana says. To ensure authenticity, she turned to twenty-five-year-old Juan Andres Maya, already one of flamenco's most exciting new dancers, to do the choreography and dance the lead. Maya, the nephew of the distinguished choreographer Mario Maya, comes from a dynasty of great Gypsy dancers. He grew up in a cave on the outskirts of Granada and learned flamenco and Spanish dance simultaneously. Last year, Santana had brought him to Manhattan for a sensational debut in a concert at Symphony Space.

A couple of months before the premiere of Federico, Santana and Maya began talking over ideas. She called in Manuel Duque, drama professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University, with whom she had collaborated in 1988 on For Whom the Bell Tolls, to supply the book. They decided to compress the author's brief life into poignant, meaningful vignettes and to limit the flamenco touches to give the story a contemporary feel. Maya says, "I had to bring home the oppression Lorca encountered. Granada then had a very closed mentality. Everyone thought he was crazy. I put that sense of isolation into the dance. The movements are sometimes tense and erratic, other times soft and gentle, to show how Federico reacted." Discussing his dramatic goals, Duque adds, "I wanted the dance to be symbolic, not literal. Many cultures fused in his work and in Granada. Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, and Moors all left their marks. In subtle ways, I bring in these influences."

Federico begins with a portrait of Garcia Lorca's loving mother (danced by the stately Santana). Then we see how the macho behavior of his schoolboy friends alienates and scars the young poet and how he finds the act of writing a refuge where he can always be himself. Duque quotes from the plays and poems to give the sense that his art reflected his life. In the last scene, the Spanish Civil War breaks out and Federico is killed. But, to Duque, death does not mean oblivion. "I show death as beautiful," he says, "as liberation, and I symbolize it with an all-encompassing and comforting white light."

The audience at the premiere that cold winter night in Granada is spellbound as the white-robed figure of Death, moving to the sound of rhythmic flamenco hand claps, approaches Federico. They sit stunned and still after the curtain falls, then burst into a standing ovation. Nowhere else would Federico encounter such a demanding audience. Garcia Lorca belongs to this city. "We all love him," says Curro Albaicin, a local musician. Afterward, a crowd of friends and family pack a small room backstage for a party. Little children hold tightly to the hands of adults, who can't wait to embrace the exhausted cast members. No one seems to be a stranger. Dancers, still in their makeup, dig into cheese and wine set out on card tables.

"I'm glad they changed out of their costumes," says designer Santiago Bandres, watching the rush for food. He had labored to make the designs integral to the drama. "I researched what people wore in the twenties and thirties," he says. "I looked at old drawings and photographs to see what was typical at that moment. I use colors symbolically. A dancer wears a red shawl in the vignette from Blood Wedding; white symbolizes inspiration and redemption. Of course, I also had to be sure the dancers could dance in them."

Santana makes her way around the noisy room, stopping to listen to comments from local aficionados. "I learned from them," she says, "and from seeing it all put together for the first time. I realized where it needed tightening and where it needed clarity." When the party ends, all the dancers go to a nearby cafe to continue the celebration, but Santana returns to her hotel. The next morning, she flies back to New York City. For a while, she can relax.

Little does she know that within weeks Maya will break his contract with her company. He has received a much more lucrative offer from Japanese impresarios. "I couldn't believe it when he told me he wouldn't come to New York," she says. Flamenco companies in Spain and the United States constantly face such disappointment because they cannot match what the Japanese pay dancers and musicians. A big flamenco star may earn $10,000 a week to perform in Japan but only $2,000 a week in New York City. Fortunately, Santana knows that Angel Rojas, who played another leading role in the Granada production, could dance the lead. "He looks much more like Lorca," she says, "and is far more reliable."

Every spring, Santana teaches for five weeks at the Lincoln Center Institute, using her own well-developed curriculum and resource books. The point of the Institute's program, designed for children from kindergarten through high school, is to get across the flavor and environment of a dance form. "Carlota's pieces go over like gangbusters," says Beverly Emmons, artistic director of the institute. Children aren't Santana's only pupils. She also teaches women twenty to sixty-five years old at the 92nd Street Y. Last year, she was asked to set up Spanish dance programs in the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina.

"As the country becomes more Hispanic," she says, "I'm getting more and more requests to educate kids in all forms of Spanish culture. I'm really pleased because it breaks down barriers between people." Santana also created the "Fiesta in the Museums" family program, which has been presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. All of her programs relate dance to Hispanic art and history.

Her interest in children goes back to the many years that she spent as a child psychotherapist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. "I loved it," she said, "but I wanted to do something with my love of Spanish dance." Few people would have had the daring to enter such a demanding field as a mature adult. But she threw herself into her new career with gusto. Twenty years ago, she moved to Spain and began her studies, taking whatever jobs she could get in the tablaos to pay for flamenco classes. "In one of my first appearances," she recalls, "the zipper on my dress broke at the beginning of the performance. There was no way to fix it, so I did my entire dance facing the audience. My partner thought I was crazy."

After such trials by fire, she returned to New York City to establish her company with choreographer Roberto Lorca. After he died in 1987, she started to present the works of others. "Carlota has been wonderful about developing new dancers and choreographers," said Le Meira, a member of Santana's company for six years.

"What I always strive for," says Santana, "is the establishment of Spanish dance as one of our basic dance forms, along with ballet, jazz, and modern. It has a very developed and advanced technique that can be used to convey a wide, wide range of ideas and emotions.

"There's no reason why every American who studies dance shouldn't learn this profound and beautiful method of expression. Just look at Federico and see how it conveys the passion and pathos of his life."

Valerie Gladstone, a contributing editor of Dance Magazine and coauthor of Balanchine's Mozartiana, writes about dance and the performing arts.