Irene La Sentío
“Flamenco is my therapy. It is my own visceral connection with my emotions”
Flamenco is a necessity to Irene La Sentío; it is the only possible way of communicating in the most honest way. Irene discovers her passion at 13 and flamenco has not left her side ever since. She completely devotes herself to it on a daily basis. It all started as a personal bet. She first saw someone dance flamenco at a fair in her italian hometown and she thought, “I want to dance like that”. That thought, marks the very start of her promising artistic future.
Irene moved to Seville at the age of 20 looking for the roots of flamenco; thirsty for new experiences and with an intense desire to learn this craft that already felt her own.
She was acquainted to the “baile” thanks to Juan de los Reyes and Juana Amaya; she then continued her training with the famous Antonio Canales, la Familia Farruco and Fuensanta La Moneta. It was thanks to Irene’s perseverance, her strength and ability to infuse her emotions that she got the artistic name of “La Sentío”; name that was given to her from La Farruca.
Her career starts then, in the “peñas flamencas” of the Andalusian capital. In 2008 she gets to the final of the Festival Internacional del Cante de las Minas de La Unión.
Thanks to the support of her mentors La Farruca and Farruquito, Irene gets to be part of some shows with high visibility and she gets to participate to festivals such as la “Bienal de Flamenco” in Seville. There, she dances in “Sonerias” for the first time and later, with the show “Baile flamenco”, she shows promise as a “pure” flamenco dancer.
La Sentío then presented her first show “De mi faldiquera” and that opened up new opportunities internationally; she went on tour with flamenco dancers such as Farruco, Óscar de los Reyes, Sergio Aranda and Jairo Barrull. Irene also participated in some international flamenco festivals such as Mont de Marsan, the Festival Flamenco in Rome, the Suma Flamenca in Madrid, the Bienal de Arte Flamenco in Malaga, the Festival Flamenco in Ibiza, in Valladolid, in Eilat (Israel), in Edmonton (Canada), in Banyuls-sur-Mer (France), the already mentioned Bienal de Sevilla and Los Jueves Flamencos de Cajasol.
With the desire to work on new projects, she has collaborated in some avant-garde shows with Tito Losada, the Chekara Orquestra of Tetuán, Jaco Abel and the pianist Miriam Méndez. In 2018 Irene performed for the first time at the well known Tablao Flamenco “Garlochí” in Tokio (Japan) as a member of Pedro Córdoba’s group. After that she worked as Artist in Residence at the University of New México (Alburquerque, USA), where she taught and created a choreography for the Company of the “National Institute of Flamenco”.
Alongside her artistic career, Irene has given classes both in Spain and abroad (Greece, Italy, France, Japan, USA and Canada).
La Sentío is also a frequent flamenco dancer in the best tablaos of Seville (El Arenal, Casa de la Memoria, Museo del Baile Flamenco), Barcelona (Tablao Cordobés, Tablao de Carmen y Los Tarantos), Madrid (Casa Patas, Tablao Villa-Rosa, Las Carboneras and Cardamomo) and Granada (“La Casa del Arte Flamenco” and “Los Olvidados”).