Flamenco Arts International’s Marina Elana Is Reimagining How We Experience Flamenco

When Marina Elana was three years old, her young parents put her in dance classes, including ballet and jazz.

“I was always dancing,” she says. “There’s lots of photos of me in costumes and glitter. And I always wanted to put on shows.”

Then, when she was about 12, her parents took her to see a José Greco flamenco performance in San Francisco.

“When I saw that show, it was kind of over for me,” she says. “I was like, what is flamenco? I love this.”

For Marina, who describes herself as intense, flamenco offered something she hadn't found in ballet.

“Ballet always felt very soft and perfect,” she says. “And there was something about the intensity and the rhythms and the physicality, the music [of flamenco]. It kind of all drew me in. It felt powerful and intoxicating.”

Over time, Marina became immersed in San Francisco’s flamenco scene, learning from mentors including Adela Clara, founder of Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco, who took her under her wing, taught her Spanish classical dance and gave her some of her first professional performance opportunities.

By then, Marina had fallen in love with the art form and, for better or worse, the artist's life that came with it.

“You're not choosing it because, you know, you think you're going to be rich and famous,” she says. “No, you're choosing it because you fell in love with the art form.”

Sometimes, she adds, that means having “$13 in your bank account, but finding a way to make it work anyway.”

Marina wanted to go to a dance conservatory in Spain, but her parents weren't quite ready to let her go that far. Instead, she landed a scholarship to Stanford. The university didn’t have a dance department at the time, so she gravitated toward film, studying film and media and avant-garde aesthetics.

But she didn’t leave flamenco behind. While at Stanford, she continued rehearsing in San Francisco and found opportunities to study in Madrid and Sevilla, where, she admits, taking dance classes and seeing shows often commanded more of her attention than schoolwork.

Still, her studies in film would eventually become part of her work in flamenco, too.

That connection became especially apparent after she and fellow dancer Isabel del Día founded Flamenco Arts International in 2023.

Starting their own company meant Marina and Isabel could begin asking different questions about the work they wanted to create.

“We wanted to tell our own stories,” Marina says. “What do we want to talk about? What do we want to say? Yes, it’s flamenco, but within that, what do we want audiences to feel?”

The answer has led Marina and Isabel toward work that stretches at the boundaries of what a flamenco performance can be. That experimentation was on full display in Songs from a Sinking Ship, FAI's ambitious, large-scale multimedia production that premiered in San Francisco earlier this year.

For Marina, Songs from a Sinking Ship also brought her background in film back into the picture.

“This is where I think my study of film comes in hard,” she says. FAI wants to bring audiences into the world of flamenco while “questioning the container in which we're showing this to you.”

That doesn't mean abandoning tradition. Marina says some of the most traditional flamenco artists who saw Songs from a Sinking Ship told her they could see how deeply the production honored the form, even as FAI reconsidered how audiences experienced it.

With Encuentros, FAI’s newest piece, Marina and Isabel are exploring that idea from a different direction.

There will be no narrative. Instead, “it's going to be intimate, a little bit looser,” Marina tells me. “We're going to be all very close to one another, and it’s going to be more improvisational and more like watching a flamenco tablao,” the traditional flamenco format.

“I really want it to be moments, connections between the artists and then also with the audience,” Marina says. “Less narrative, more feeling, more moments.”

That looseness is intentional. Flamenco, Marina explains, is built around what she calls “structured improvisation.” The artists will enter with a plan, but within that structure, they have room to respond to one another in the moment.

That means no two performances of Encuentros will be quite the same.

For Marina, that's part of the thrill.

“It's almost like you can't be thinking,” she says. “You just have to be feeling and listening and being so present.”

She compares the experience to meditation: listening closely enough to receive whatever another performer gives her—a piece of music from the guitarist, a phrase from a singer—and responding without knowing exactly what will happen next.

“That's the fun part about not knowing what's about to happen next,” she says.

That element of unpredictability helped shape the lineup for Encuentros. Guitarist Eugenio Iglesias, whom Marina has known for more than 15 years, joins singers Cachito Diaz, Marian Fernandez and Marina's longtime dance partner Carlos Menchaca. Special guest Nino de los Reyes, a Grammy-winning flamenco dancer known for his command of rhythm and improvisation, was, Marina says, “a really perfect fit for this kind of more improvised energy.”

But the encounters aren’t only happening among the performers.

In the Palace Theater’s intimate, 150-seat space, the separation between artist and audience will sometimes become deliberately porous, with performers moving offstage and into the room.

“We can feel as artists immediately whether we have the audience with us or not,” Marina says. “We want to bring people in as soon as possible so that they can go on the journey with us.”

“The dancers will be turning, and sweat will be flying,” Marina says.

For someone encountering flamenco for the first time, Marina isn't particularly concerned with whether they understand every lyric—or even what they're seeing.

“I want you to leave the theater thinking that you went on this journey with us, that you came into our world and we experienced it together,” she says.

“Did you get excited?” Marina says. “Did you feel something?”

For her, that's enough.

Flamenco Arts International presents Encuentros
Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026
7 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.
The Palace Theater
644 Broadway, San Francisco
Tickets: From $43.95