Kiyo Asaoka took her first steps into the Flamenco dance world in 1998, as a student at Arte Flamenco Spanish Dance Company.

In 2001, she became a company dancer and started performing at various and many dance festivals in Toronto, as well as Spanish cultural venues, restaurants and private/social/corporate events. Her eagerness for learning the artform expanded from Toronto to Spain. To this day, she has studied with a number of flamenco masters such as Javier Latorre, Isaac Tovar, Concha Jareno, La Lupi, Ana Morales and many more.

Since 2014, she has also started working individually with a variety of artists to choreograph and perform her own creations. In 2016, she also started producing and directing.

There have been various dance events that she was chosen for with or without her flamenco peers. She has participated in music videos as well.

Along with the passion and dedication to the traditional style flamenco Kiyo always has, she also has been eager to work on the Japanese-influenced style flamenco. Her first opportunity to showcase it was in 2007. And then ‘Quemado’ (2013) made her realize this is a way to express herself and her roots. Since then, she has been collaborating with ten ten, a Japanese traditional music artist, to work on their own unique and new yet traditional creation. They have started working together regularly and been performing in various events.

Not only as a dancer, Kiyo also participates in the Toronto flamenco community as a flamenco dance teacher and also as a manager/organizer of Tablao Flamenco Toronto, which provides monthly live flamenco performances. It started small in 2015 but it has been growing and giving opportunities for flamenco artists to perform and for Torontonians to enjoy the beautiful art form.

While she continually strives with her strong commitment and passion for puro-flamenco to improve and studies under the tutelage of flamenco masters from Spain, as one of the long-time flamenco dancers in Toronto, she feels it’s her mission to keep on dancing and to keep flamenco exposed to the public.

She would like to contribute as a dancer and also as the organizer of Tablao Flamenco Toronto. She believes flamenco doesn’t have politics and is inclusive, diverse and welcoming of all. She would like to introduce flamenco to more people in Toronto, so it becomes popular and the community gets more together and bigger for the next generation.

https://www.facebook.com/TablaoFlamencoToronto/