Doors at 7:30 pm; Show at 8:00 pm

Tickets are $20

We focus on flamenco women tonight as Ashkenaz and Women Drummers International celebrate Women’s History Month with our March series of special concerts and workshops, the Maestra Series, featuring women musicians, dancers, and poets from around the world. The nights are filled with inspired culture, singing, dancing, drumming, performers in new groupings, once-only collaborations, and reunions of pioneering women musicians.

“Mujeres Flamencas Unidas,” featuring the Caminos Flamencos troupe, is a whirlwind entertainment of breathtaking color, costumes, irresistible flamenco guitar rhythms, and some of the most beautiful flamenco dancing this side of Spain. It is directed by Emmy Award-winning dancer-choreographer Yaelisa, who has taught and mentored flamenco students at Ashkenaz since 1997. Yaelisa and her Caminos Flamencos tonight encompass music director Jason McGuire “El Rubio,” singer Daniel Azcarate, and a cast of 12 dancers, including Devon LaRussa, Molly Rogers, Yukie Takahashi, La Perla, Ligia Giese, Kiki Korner, AltaGracia Valencia, Linda Vecchiarelli, and Rebecca Sedillo.

The evening celebrates the strength, diversity, and vitality of the woman in flamenco, an art form that revels in its duality of the masculine/feminine. The performance includes selected performers from Yaelisa’s flamenco school in newly created solos and ensemble works choreographed by the dancers and Yaelisa. Flamenco as an art has a long history of struggle against oppression, of creation and expression of a Gypsy (Rom) and nomadic people who resisted the conformity of their times to create their own world. “Flamenco is nothing like any other music,” Yaelisa explains. “It’s a participatory art form, a collaboration and very improvisational.”