Hooked on Flamenco

By Leanne Yohemas

Annette Morcos, BSc'92, MBA'97, was hooked on flamenco dancing even before she knew what it was.

As a young girl, she became instantly obsessed after watching Gypsies dance in a movie. “I knew nothing about it, but I wanted to go and see it,” she says. But it wasn’t until she heard a recording of the legendary Spanish flamenco singer Camaron de la Isla that Morcos decided she must go to Spain to see the dance for herself. She cried when she heard the music. “It was the passion and powerfulness of it.”

Morcos became obsessed with everything Spanish, taking up singing as well as dance, and now is founder of the Calgary flamenco group, Salero Caló, and of the Fineza Flamenca Dance School. She dances, teaches and produces shows for other dancers.

Morcos says she learned about flamenco the hard way.

“I didn’t grow up taking dance lessons; that came in my university years,” says the two-time U of C graduate. “I basically taught myself—I didn’t have a mentor, which made it hard at times.”

Morcos, with her shiny, long black hair, twinkling brown eyes and slight build, looks like she was born in Spain into a family of dancers. That wasn’t the case. She was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Kuwait and came to Canada in the 1980s with her parents and three siblings.

Still, her attraction to flamenco music and dance isn’t entirely surprising. As a child, she spent hours in her basement dancing alone and, in her household, it was common to hear Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arabic and Armenian music. Flamenco is derived from the multi-culturalism that existed in Spain where Spanish, Moorish Arab, Gypsy and Sephardic traditions and cultures collided in the southern part of the country.

After completing her undergraduate science degree, Morcos worked full-time during the day as a research scientist at the Health Science Centre at the Foothills Hospital and took her MBA part-time in the evening. On Fridays, she took dance. When the dancing got more serious, she melded work with her art, taking a business internship with the Canadian consulate in Mexico where she worked in marketing and boned up on her Spanish and dancing. And when Morcos finally went to Spain, she taught English as a Second Language in big companies and danced her spare time away.

After completing her MBA, Morcos decided to combine her business skills with her passion for flamenco, founding her dance group and school. “I thought I might as well do what I love.”