In Amor, Quejío y Vuelo, one of New Mexico’s most compelling flamenco artists turns heartbreak into something closer to grace.
BY BRETT E. TRUSKO
La Emi does not think of flamenco as something that happens in front of an audience. It happens with one.
“We’re in it together,” she says. From the first note until the final bow, the exchange is meant to move in both directions: singer to dancer, dancer to guitarist, company to crowd, and—on the best nights—back again. A glance from the stage catches someone who is no longer merely watching. The audience member feels the dancer feeling; the dancer feels that recognition and goes further. No translation is required.
That reciprocity is at the heart of Amor, Quejío y Vuelo, the new production from EmiArteFlamenco. The title—Love, Lament, Flight—is not decorative. It is the plot. A woman falls deeply in love, passes through the grief-stricken cry of heartbreak, and eventually finds the spiritual strength to rise above it. The familiar flamenco intensity is there, but this is not a collection of unrelated numbers in the usual tablao tradition. La Emi and her company have constructed an explicit narrative, clearly told in music and movement.
The choice grew from years of listening to audiences. They loved the dancing, but wanted to understand the story beneath it. Here, the program traces thought, longing, lament, ecstasy, trust, love, joy, confusion, power, hope, injury, and finally flight. The journey is clear enough to follow and open enough to inhabit. People who are married, divorced, grieving, estranged from a friend, or simply old enough to know that love and loss sometimes arrive together can find themselves somewhere along the way.
Quejío is the difficult word and the indispensable one. Its meaning is not captured by a neat English equivalent. It is the cry inside flamenco singing—the sound of grief before grief has arranged itself into polite language. La Emi describes it as raw emotion, recognizable because sooner or later life takes everyone there.
The production refuses to leave its heroine in that place. Its final movement is neither escape nor a convenient theatrical happy ending. For La Emi, who speaks candidly about her Christian faith, vuelo is transcendence: the discovery of resilience within oneself and connection to something larger. The final number is an alabanza—a flamenco worship song in a genre of praise that her family has listened to for years. It is the most emotionally demanding part of the evening, she says, because it brings her closest to the presence of God.
La Emi has been preparing for work like this nearly all her life. Her mother attended flamenco performances while pregnant with her; La Emi saw her first show at two, began studying with María Benítez at four, and was teaching in Northern New Mexico public-school programs by 12. She later trained intensively in Spain, but she has no interest in reproducing someone else’s flamenco. New Mexico, she argues, has lived with the form for generations and has become an international flamenco center in its own right. Tradition survives not by impersonation but by being inhabited.
That idea also explains the company around her. Musical director and singer Vicente Griego, her godfather, has helped shape the work from its beginning. The production brings together New Mexican artists including Janira Cordova, Aislin Robertson, and percussionist Eddie Garcia with artists from farther afield: guitarist Misael Barraza-Díaz of Mexico, Madrid-born dancer and choreographer José Junco, El Paso singer Olivia Rojas, and others appearing in rotation. The result is disciplined but never embalmed.
Group passages are precisely choreographed. Solos retain the improvisational conversation that makes flamenco thrilling: a dancer looks toward the musicians, a phrase changes direction, palmas lock into the compás, and everyone lands together. The audience changes the equation as well. A smaller house can generate more energy than a full one. A performer arrives carrying the emotions of that particular day. The work is fixed enough to remain itself and alive enough never to repeat exactly.
That is why seeing the production twice is not redundant. During its summer premiere at Santa Fe’s Inn & Spa at Loretto, two performances only days apart had noticeably different temperaments. La Emi expects the distance to grow as the season continues. “If someone sees it the first week and sees it the last week,” she says, “they’re going to say, ‘Whoa. Different show.’” Her promise is simple: it will keep evolving.
The same ethic extends beyond performance. Through EmiArteFlamenco Academy and its school residencies, La Emi says the organization has reached more than 10,000 New Mexico children. The purpose is not to manufacture professional dancers. It is to teach confidence, responsibility, leadership, and the habit of showing up fully. Her long-term ambition is equally practical: preserve flamenco for another generation while creating year-round work that allows New Mexican artists to make a living here.
For a newcomer, there is little homework. Read the storyline if you want a guide, but do not worry about understanding every Spanish word. Watch the exchanges. Listen for the rhythmic conversation. Notice the difference between what the heroine shows the world and the selves she wrestles with inside. Then let the performance do what La Emi intends.
I want them to leave saying, “I felt that.”
For a city that sometimes treats culture as a beautiful object to be admired from a safe distance, that is a useful invitation. Flamenco was not born as an ornament for royalty. It came from families, streets, struggle, and the need to give emotion a form. Amor, Quejío y Vuelo honors that inheritance by refusing to keep it behind glass. It asks the audience to enter the story—and then helps it find its way out.
SEE THE SHOW
SEPTEMBER 5 Old Martinez Hall, Ranchos de Taos. Performance at 7:30 p.m.; doors at 6:45 p.m.
SEPTEMBER 19–20 Tablao La Pinta Flamenca, presented by Phoenix World Arts Collective at the Arizona Latino Arts & Cultural Center in Phoenix. Saturday, 7–9 p.m.; Sunday, 3–5 p.m.
SEPTEMBER 24–OCTOBER 4 Inn & Spa at Loretto, Santa Fe. Thursday–Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Doors open 45 minutes before each performance.
OCTOBER 9 Hotel Encanto de Las Cruces. Performance at 7:30 p.m.; doors at 6:45 p.m.
DECEMBER 26–31 Eldorado Hotel & Spa, Santa Fe, including a New Year’s Eve performance with a champagne toast. Evening performances at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday matinee at 2 p.m. Doors open 45 minutes before each performance.
