Triptíco

Choreographer: Carola Zertuche, Theater Flamenco San Francisco

Dancers: Nol Simonse, Nevarex Encinas, Carola Zertuche

Dance Mission Theater

May 11th, 2025

By Kristen Cosby

The sole performance of Carola Zertuche’s Triptíco, the finale act of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, was staged at Dance Mission Theater on Sunday, May 11th,  just days after the rescinding of NEA grants across the nation.  

 As artistic director of Theater Flamenco, choreographer and dancer Carola Zertuche managed to address this devastating moment indirectly, by presenting a work that quietly defied divisions and rules. Triptíco establishes a world in which precarious situations can remain in balance, and traditions can be altered and honored at the same time. Perhaps most importantly, Tripitíco also suggests conformity isn’t necessary for unity, and togetherness is possible while still honoring each individual. 

Zertuche is no stranger to creating avant guard worlds that fuse flamenco and contemporary dance.  At times, it frightens her to bend the traditions of flamenco this far. However, despite the rebelliousness of Triptíco, the piece remained rooted in the conventions of flamenco – much of the performed work remained unset, every dancer created a solo that was largely improvised, the composer/musician (Pascual Martinez) was live on stage mixing the different palos, or styles and rhythms of flamenco. But, instead of playing guitar or singing, as is typical, Martinez composed on a soundboard. 

The creation of Tripitíco began as an experiment. Zertuche knew she wanted to build a piece around the bodies of her fellow dancers, Nol Simonse and Nevarex Encinas, and the bata de cola, the long-trained, ruffled skirts traditionally worn by female flamenco dancers. She wanted to see what a male body trained in contemporary dance (Simonse) and male body trained in flamenco (Encinas) would do together in those skirts. She’d come to the first rehearsal with notions of choreographing a trio, but in that first rehearsal, she decided no. She stood aside, and watched them. “And,” she says, “I became a ghost.”

At the piece’s opening, Zertuche’s ghost stands downstage right in a dark fog with her face obscured by a large, transparent amber comb, while Simonse and Encinas hunch obscured under their long, black ruffled skirts. In the dark, they look like mounds of earth. Upstage left are two empty pairs of shoes, and upstage right, two sticks lie in a V. When Simonse and Encinas first rise from the floor, their entire bodies and faces remain hooded by the skirts and beneath those hoods is pure darkness. The effect is terrifying. Only when their hands emerge and then their torsos and the skirts drop around their legs do they begin to bind together into earthly, creaturely forms: a spider, a beast, a bird in flight. And only then did I remember to breathe. 

Zertuche masterfully uses the concept of the tryptic to create tension on stage, but also creates a study in “difference.” At the opening, the two men are hemmed in by skirts, the lone woman is in pants, two dancers are barefoot, and one noticeably wears and solos in flamenco heels.  As if the entire piece were a game of “one of these things is not like the other.” But then the groupings and the differences shift. Two dancers perform flamenco, one contemporary. When the men shed their skirts, two dancers wear pants that differ in color from the other.  The effect is anticipation, you can’t wait to see what will change next (or if the shoes lying upstage will ever be filled) and how these bodies will regroup as a result. Perhaps because the sequence is built so directly from the dancers’ collaboration and so much of it remains improvised, everything that occurs onstage feels natural, deliciously unexpected, and precious. We are witnessing an event that will never occur precisely in the same way again. And we are witnessing it as the funding for such works is being eroded.  

For one fleeting moment, Zertuche and Simonse kneel and fill the waiting shoes with small lights that illuminate their faces, and then stick their hands into the shoes and pound an improvised duet typically performed by clapping hands into the floor. Encinas grabs sticks from upstage (used instead of the traditional flamenco canes) to tap his part of the rhythm. At one point, he does so using the side of his face. He then raises the sticks to his head and extends his tongue, becoming a bull ready to charge, while Simonse and Zertuche crawl their shoes downstage, and composer Martinz holds a microphone next to their tapping shoes, using the delay effect to create an echo. We are in a weird, wild place. 

From there Zertuche rises and performs a pure flamenco solo, changing the rhythm of her feet several times and flicking her wrists and elbows to the side.The two other dancers stand aside in awed observation with the audience. Flamenco by nature is defiant, and Zertuche’s rendering was so intense that it elicited cries from the audience.

Throughout, the three dancers proceed towards uprightness, upbeatness, lightness, and become increasingly human and draw closer together.  But even when they perform unified steps while lined up across the stage, their upper bodies move uniquely.  When they turn to the side, two dancers face one direction, and the third in the opposite. In the final moments of the piece, they coalesce as a singular, unified form, standing three-deep, facing front as a strong, tender and defiant human unit of individuals.  And, then, as one, they turn from the audience with aching slowness, and drift away. 

What was made clear by the standing ovation that followed is that, despite the current political climate, this cannot be the last staging of this piece, or the last work performed by Theater Flamenco of San Francisco, or the last work of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Nor do I think it will be.