Baile is flamenco's dance branch, built on three techniques: zapateado (percussive footwork struck with reinforced heels), floreo (rotating finger work), and braceo (curving arm shapes). On stage the dancer stands at the centre with guitar and singer flanking; a look or a raised arm cues the guitarist to change chords, and 'Olé!' from the crowd synchronises everyone. Each palo has its own choreographic vocabulary — soleá is the dark, heavy solo for women; farruca is the masculine footwork showcase; tangos is the leaping celebratory duet; bulería can dissolve into a whole ensemble improvising in turn. The escobilla — a footwork-only section in the middle of a piece where song and guitar drop out and only the dancer's shoes speak — is the emotional climax.

Baile took stage shape in the late-nineteenth-century café cantante era. Its first stars were the Argentina sisters — La Argentina (1888-1936) and La Argentinita (1898-1945). Carmen Amaya (1913-63, a Barcelona Gitana) then rewrote the male-coded zapateado vocabulary from a woman's body, and Hollywood took notice — she filmed for MGM and RKO in the 1940s. In the 1960s Antonio Gades (1936-2004), a non-Gitano from Alicante, turned Lorca's Blood Wedding into a dance work, and his three films with director Carlos Saura — Blood Wedding (1981), Carmen (1983), and Love the Magician (1986) — carried flamenco baile into the global arthouse. In 1978 Gades became founding artistic director of the Ballet Nacional de España's flamenco arm.

You need video, not audio. Watch the accent placement in zapateado — the dancer will drop the loudest heel-hits on the weakest beats of the compás, silencing the strong beats, a technique called 'flipping the compás.' Watch the llamada (the raised-arm call for the next section) and the cierre (the closing snap): when the dancer freezes, the guitar and voice resolve the chord in the same instant. Israel Galván's La edad de oro (2005) deliberately breaks the traditional compás and holds silence between gestures as a modernist argument. Sara Baras's Sueños (2009) is the opposite pole — traditional form scaled up for a big theatre with strings and dramatic lighting.

Watch Carlos Saura's Bodas de Sangre (1981), a film of a Gades company rehearsal — the clearest look at how a baile piece is constructed. Then Sara Baras's Sueños (2009, filmed for DVD) for the contemporary commercial peak, and Israel Galván's La edad de oro (2005) for the avant-garde extreme. If a Spanish company tours near you, see it live — recordings can never carry the physical vibration of the floor through your body, and that vibration is half the point.

The bata de cola, the flamenco woman's trailing-hem gown, is a specialty garment made in Seville and Madrid and costs roughly the equivalent of one-to-two thousand euros per one-off piece. Farruquito, born Juan Manuel Fernández Montoya in 1982, is the great-grandson of the legendary bailaor Farruco. He served a prison term (2007-10) for a fatal hit-and-run traffic accident in 2003, and his 2018 tour Improvisao is a public re-establishment of himself as a bailaor. Rocío Molina won the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale Danza — the first flamenco bailaora to receive that prize.