Off a sleepy block of North Beach, where sagging telephone lines lead to a glimpse of the bay, shouts of “Olé!” rang out on a recent Saturday night.

Beneath yellowing acoustic tiles and faded paper garlands in a former speakeasy — no longer as glamorous as when Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio dined here after their wedding in 1954 — castanets clacked and guitar strummings radiated like heat on the streets of old Seville.

A woman in red twirled her flounces and braided hair past diners eating vegan empanadas atop white tablecloths. Tachíria Flamenco, her chosen legal name, tapped her castanet-clad fingers against a water bottle, smiled, then clicked her way back to the stage.

这是一个经典的旧金山夜生活that’s played out since at least the 1950s, when stars like Lola Montes and Isa Mura starred in the popular flamenco showcases at the Old Spaghetti Factory, popularizing a centuries-old art form that includes guitar, percussion work, singing and — perhaps most iconically — dance. But such a scene has become rare in recent years, and not just due to the pandemic.

Tachíria Flamenco revived this weekly show at Bolivian restaurant Peña Pachamama just one month ago. The show had gone dark while Tachiria mourned the death of her mother, Carolina Lugo, a mainstay of the art form in the Bay Area, in March.

Other leading figures in the local flamenco scene are also now gone, for very different reasons, taking with them their showcases and classes. The case of guitarist Jason “El Rubio” Maguire and his wife, Yaelisa, former artistic director of Caminos Flamencos and the New World Flamenco Festival, is particularly gut-wrenching. After their mortgage lender collapsed and a new bank took over the loan for their Oakland home, the couple said their interest rate doubled. In 2021, they were forced to abandon both their house and the 600-square-foot rehearsal space they had built in their backyard and move to Riverside County. Their former protege, Mizuho Sato, says, “There’s so many lost Yaelisa students, I call them stray cats.”

Another flamenco star, Isadora Duncan Dance Award winner La Tania, has made displacement the theme of her new show, “Solaz,” opening Friday, July 21, at the Presidio Theatre — a production she returned from Spain to present.

With La Tania already struggling to pay the mortgage on her San Francisco studio, the loss of live classes when COVID hit sent her first to Mendocino County and then all the way to Seville. Displacement is nothing new for her; she grew up bouncing around Europe and the U.S. with her artist grandmother and flamenco dancer mother, but the Bay Area had been her artistic home for 30 years.

“I would like to come back to San Francisco,” La Tania told The Chronicle via video from Seville, “if the situation was something that worked for me, because I have a very strong community built up there.”

Seville, where flamenco spills from every cobbled street corner day and night, is not the worst landing place for a dancer hit by the cost of living in California. Most serious U.S. flamenco artists live there for at least six months to several years during their formative training, then frequently return either there or to Madrid.

Milwaukee, on the other hand, is a less likely new hot spot for flamenco. That’s where dancer Kerensa DeMars ended up after the landlord of her husband’s San Francisco art studio tripled his rent in 2019.

“I’m probably the only flamenco artist who shovels 8 feet of snow out of her driveway to get to the gig,” the San Francisco Art Institute graduate said, with a laugh, by phone.

In the Bay Area, DeMars recalled, “I had just reached the cusp of doing it long enough to get funding,” having obtained grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Zellerbach Family Fund and Theater Bay Area after more than a decade of work. Relocating also meant leaving behind the weekly flamenco show DeMars had created 13 years earlier at Thirsty Bear restaurant. (The show eventually closed anyway due to the pandemic.)

Fortunately, snowy Milwaukee has proven surprisingly hospitable, even if flamenco looks quite different there. DeMars’ “Flamenco Nutcracker” is going into its fourth year, and she’s been able to attract grants as head of one of the few bilingual arts organizations in the city.

DeMars’ persistence is driven by the liberation she found in “the archetype of the flamenca,” which traces its history to 18th century Gypsy (also known as Roma) culture.

Unlike Tachíria, La Tania and Yaelisa, who were all trained by their mothers, DeMars began her dance career in the Japanese style of butoh before discovering modern belly dance and joining the FatChanceBellyDance troupe. But, she admitted, “I always felt hushed in Middle Eastern dance, and it didn’t resonate with my personality.”

“In flamenco the whole woman is allowed expression, whereas in many dance forms, you’re supposed to smile or have a certain body type or only be feminine and flirty but not fierce or frustrated,” she continued. “There’s so many styles in flamenco, there’s room for everything.”

Now, even as many leave the city, flamenco artists who have managed to stay are finding signs of a reawakening in San Francisco, where flamenco traces its roots to the colonial-era Californios who brought Spanish dances from Mexico. For instance, the 57-year-old company Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco celebrated in May a nearly sold-out one-night return to the stage at the 916-seat Herbst Theatre.

“I was worried whether people would come, and it was a little risky because I was experimenting with the music, with trumpet and electric guitar,” said the company’s artistic director and star Carola Zertuche, who learned flamenco in Mexico City and came to San Francisco in 1998. “But people want to go out to see shows now, and it’s the same in my classes.”

Even Yaelisa, who amid her mortgage crisis worked the deli counter at Sprouts supermarket, now has steady teaching work in Southern California and plans to reconnect with her former Bay Area students.

In addition to returning dancers, a new generation of dancers is stepping up.

佐藤,谁拿了类与拉塔尼亚和应用earing in La Tania’s world premiere in the coming days, can’t call on the authority of a family history in flamenco. She started out in classical ballet in Japan and discovered flamenco in a college workshop in Tokyo. But after Yaelisa’s departure from the Bay Area, “I thought, ‘OK, maybe I should flip this. Maybe it’s my turn.’”

Sato began calling her students her company, and leading flash-mob-style flamenco dances in the Mission, as well as monthly showcases in the South Bay. For her, as for the other artists, the dancing is about much more than entertainment — it’s survival.

“There’s something calledflamencura. That’s the healing power flamenco has,” said Sato. “You know, sometimes you hear the cliche of flamenco, that it’s about passion and fire. It’s not just that. It’s a community that supports each other.”

With a sociology background, Sato notes the form’s beginnings among marginalized people, those known as Gypsies, and sees flamenco’s channeling of dark emotions in a close circle of supporters as a way to heal trauma. Personally, she said, flamenco helped her heal after leaving an abusive marriage.

“I felt the urge to stand up and say, ‘Hey, community, I survived using this tool calledflamencura, and it might help you,’ ” Sato said.

Perhaps that healing power is why — whether in its dinner show incarnations, in improvised street styles or in the guttural cries offlamenco pura —this style of dance may have to fight for its foothold, but it doesn’t die.

To La Tania, who started a company in Madrid at age 17, flamenco is her true home. “I’ve never had a moment of questioning it,” she said. “It’s an art that speaks your emotions. It’s universal.”

Yaelisa agreed, citing flamenco’s presence in her life since she was a child and vowing, “This is what I’ll be doing until I can’t anymore.”

At Peña Pachamama, after Tachíria’s performance, the tiny singer La Yuli, dressed in flowered pants and a tasseled bolero vest, stamped out rapid footwork and waved her red hat in a dance known as “La Garrotín.” The show’s producer, Richard Tonkin, set out his own panama hat for tips as theolesfrom a dozen audience members quieted.

Visiting tables after her set, La Yuli beamed.

“There aren’t a lot of happy dances in flamenco,” she said, “and we like to make the dinners upbeat.”

Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.