STEP BY STEP

Gabriela Estrada was stunned when the University of Houston’s school of dance director invited her to teach flamenco in 2022, a rare opportunity in U.S. higher education. This marked a transformative phase for Estrada and Houston’s arts community.

Estrada’s family loved the arts. “When my mom listens to music, her body transforms,” she explains. “I am that way as well.”

Music, in a way, is Estrada’s first love, and dance is simply a vehicle to embody it. She talks at length about the many benefits of dance — strength, flexibility, dexterity, cognitive development — but they all come back to sheer joy.

Estrada learned ballet and modern dance from dance pioneers in her hometown of Hermosillo, Mexico. After graduat- ing from high school, she had private voice training, performed solo pieces, sang in musical theatre productions, joined a performing group in Mexico City and majored in dance at the University of California, Irvine.

UC Irvine’s Spanish Dance Ensemble was Estrada’s first in- troduction to flamenco dance, and a few weeks after learning the very basics — “this is an arm; this is a foot” — she joined the company, diving headfirst into flamenco’s complex rhythms and subgenres and performing and choreographing local shows. Estrada returned to Mexico after graduating, joined the University of Sonora dance faculty and accomplished her dream of founding a dance college.

When she returned to UC Irvine for her MFA, she was offered the opportunity to teach flamenco and lead the Spanish Dance Ensemble. Once she completed the master’s program, she moved to Seville, Spain — the “heart of flamenco” — to earn her doctorate in Flamenco Interdisciplinary Studies. One of the only people in the cohort who was not a local flamenco professional, Estrada was advised to keep quiet about her studies. After teaching and choreographing flamenco for 15 years, she still felt like a beginner.

“My mindset, now, is to enter a space knowing that people have the basic element of flamenco, which is an attitude and a rhythm, in their breath and in their heartbeat.”

“It was very humbling, but I was determined to learn,” she says. Estrada analyzed the poetic lyrics and octosyllabic verses. She watched professional flamenco artists sweat to perfect their timing. She absorbed documentaries on Spanish history. Her understanding of dance, art, tradition, culture and learning was shifting.

Estrada’s dissertation focused on the contributions of flamenco to ballet, tracing historical exchanges all connected by colonization, travel and artistic collaboration. The first ballet company in the court of King Louis XIV included Spanish folk dancers, whose movements became part of ballet vocabulary. Flamenco was influenced by the African diaspora and various forms of the tango — African, Cuban, flamenco and Argentinian.

“We don’t need to ‘decolonize’ ballet,” she says. “We need to acknowledge its roots.”

She realized focusing on shape and eye line — elements emphasized in ballet — fundamentally misrepresents flamenco.

“My mindset, now, is to enter a space knowing that people have the basic element of flamenco, which is an attitude and a rhythm, in their breath and in their heartbeat.”

Estrada says she was drawn to UH — a Hispanic-serving tier-one institution — by the leadership of President Renu Khator and Andrew Davis, dean of the Kathrine G. McGovern College of Arts, and their enthusiasm for interdisciplinary instruction.

“Flamenco is a hybrid multicultural art form that integrates a mosaic of historic cultural references from diverse peoples, lands, traditions and artistic expressions,” she says, so the approach “felt like a ring to a finger.” Estrada’s classes incorporate the Spanish language, cultural and geographical references, anecdotes, and discussions about the mutual influence of global cultures in dance development. She recently invited José Galán, director of Flamenco Inclusivo in Seville, to teach her students remotely about adapting the art form for dancers with different bodies and abilities.

“When you think of flamenco, you think of serious footwork,” Estrada says. “You would never think of somebody in a wheelchair doing flamenco, right? It is a mind-shift.” Many of her students will go on to teach their own classes, now prepared to include and empower people long excluded from traditional dance. One of the marks of a transformative teacher, Estrada says, is that they can see the artistry within you and draw it out “like magic.”

In addition to teaching, Estrada collaborates as a choreographer for the UH opera and plans to eventually develop a documentary to honor her late mentor, Héctor Zaraspe. She’s thrilled to be reconstructing “Felipe ‘El Loco,’” a lost performance from the 1950s based on the legend of Felix Fernandez. Artists from all parts of Estrada’s life are involved, including her students and fellow faculty at UH and highly regarded Spanish composer Juan Parrilla.

“All this because of the immense support and vision of Dean Davis,” she says.

Things come full circle. Her daughter continues the dance legacy by touring with Ballet Hispanico. Estrada believes in inclusivity and the importance of arts in education.

“The key ‘gatekeeper’ of any learning is the lack of opportunities to learn,” says Estrada. The opposite of gatekeeping is inclusion. “Education matters. The arts matter."