To fill all 2,257 seats at New York City Center with infectious joy seems like a hard task to execute, but not for Sara Baras in her evening-length work 'ALMA,' presented by Flamenco Festival 2023.
As a child growing up in Phoenix, on most Sunday mornings (at least those I wasn’t playing hooky), one would have found me at the big downtown Central United Methodist Church. It wasn’t the nearest Methodist church, but it did have the best choir. Closest to home was a beautiful little church in the style of Southwestern Spanish missions, Bethel United Methodist. It was small and sleepy and losing parishioners at a rate that would lead to the church calling it quits in 2007.