Nineteen days after Fidel Castro’s death there still existed, throughout the country, a kind of unofficial curfew. Shows, concerts and cultural events of a certain magnitude were reprogrammed or their profile considerably reduced. But on December 14, 2016, after all the ropes were tightened, a concert would take place in Havana’s Cathedral Square. A beautiful concert for the 40 years of Síntesis, one of the most emblematic Cuban bands of all times, together with their guests. Three years later, that concert, released as the DVD Síntesis 4 decades (Unicornio, 2019), directed by Joseph Ros, is evocative ―especially music wise, according to the director― of a show that was lucky to have the performances of Silvio Rodríguez, Amaury Pérez, Ernán López-Nussa, Niurka González and José María Vitier, among others. It is precisely the release of the band's new production and its nomination to the Cubadisco Awards which motivated this dialogue with Carlos Alfonso and Ele Valdés, founders of Síntesis. A pretext, as if it one was necessary, to also speak of 40 years of music. How did the idea come up of ​​celebrating this anniversary with a concert in Cathedral Square? Ele Valdés (EV): Síntesis started there on December 14, 1976,...

Pedestrians were shocked to see a man putting up an unusual performance in a public place in Havana, where he was supposedly using one of the few wifi hotspots available in Cuba to communicate with his wife abroad, and give her a surprise on their first wedding anniversary. One Saturday morning, Luis Manuel Otero hired a pair of Mariachis to join him while he performed the sensual dance in front of his camera phone for his partner and the world to see. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbGL59j6P5o Later, it was known that Luis Manuel is a visual artist, and that his public striptease was a performance titled United by WiFi. Otero’s work sought to reflect on the lack of privacy Cubans have to face when accessing the Internet – a service that cannot be hired at homes, and that they can only use in a few parks and squares across the country. “This performance is born out of my annoyance with the fact that this is virtually the only option millions of Cubans have when they want to use the service. That’s why I thought of this wedding anniversary celebration and the public striptease, I thought it was a good chance for everyone to...

Havana’s busiest week for theatre fans (October 22-31) brings 37 foreign plays and 13 by national troupes this year. The 16th Havana Theater Festival will open with Charenton, directed by Flora Lauten and staged by the Buendia Theater Company. This year the festival will be paying tribute to the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Buendia Theater Company, as well as to the work of British theatre director Peter Brook. The academic section of the festival will begin with the screening of the documentary film Tell me lies, directed by Simon Brook, son of Peter Brook, and will continue with lectures on theatre direction and the role of theatre in today’s world. Some of the must see in the international program are Ave Maria. Death feels lonely, by Odin Teatret, from Denmark, directed by Eugenio Barba; and Heiner Muller’s I didn't kill myself yesterday because of you, by Teatro de Konstanz, directed by Rogelio Orizondo. Other interesting options are Writing in sand, by FUNDarte, from the United States; The consecration of Spring, by She She Pop, Germany; Ubú on the table, by Théâtre de la pire espèce, Canada; and Glory Box, by Finucane and Smith, Australia. We cannot forget...

The halo of mystery that surrounds British street artist Banksy –his real name and physical appearance are unknown, and many other details of his biography are uncertain– reached Cuba in the distant Caribbean, where a few of his works indicate that he must have visited Havana and Jamaica around 2004. When Cuban artist Nestor Sire heard that Banksy had been in Havana along with Jon Carter, and that he had left his imprint on the walls of this city, he went out to find them. Nestor walked the streets of Havana looking for the three graffiti Banksy had left: the iconic image of Che Guevara, based on the famous picture by Alberto Korda; his signature gangster rat icon, and his stencil slogan: “This is not a photo opportunity.” To rescue the gangster rat image, Nestor used a group of restorers specialized in mural painting, who, under the direction of Alberto Chia Collazo and Yanira Ortega, used a method known as stacco to detach the piece from the wall without damaging it. Nestor decided to show the grafitti for the first time at the 12th Havana Biennial. The piece, titled “Banksy in Havana: All for Sale,” can be actually bought for...

Inevitably, one assumes the Malecon in Havana as start and end. Plain door of a city-of a country-, drowned in a sea without which life would be unbearable. But door finally opens often for his people to breathe the salt and get lost for a few hours on the horizon. Door that opened to art three years ago with the project Behind the wall, an invasion of visual works, in its most interactive, which occupied for more than thirty days all the way from La Punta to Maceo Park. About this intervention, on the 11th Havana Biennial, curator Elvia Rosa Castro wrote: "(...) most parts located on it (on the boardwalk) knew how to grasp the benefits and hostilities of a space like this to experiential level, dialogue with the environment and serve a dual purpose: to combine the critical edge or social commentary with that quality of visual and interactive attraction that usually is seen when art ventures into those spaces where usually it does not belong ". Perhaps this is one of the biggest challenges this project now confronts when its second edition in the 12th Havana Biennial, on May 24tyh, is inaugurated. "Behind the wall is a...

Havana could have a Museum of Contemporary Art in the coming months. At least until the 12th Havana Biennial to occupy squares and cultural centers between May 22 and June 22 this year with visual projects of more than 200 artists from about 44 countries   The event, which actually is being done every three years, continues to respect, according to its director Jorge Fernández Torres, the original sense that gave it birth: to give voice to those artists who have had less opportunity to express themselves, while putting talking to artists from different regions and with different art visions.   Between the idea and experience, rather than issue, it will be method and practice of work at the Biennial, bringing together artists with a multidisciplinary team including scientists, botanists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists, to work on the concept of art expansion, its relationship to the contexts and the incorporation of knowledge.   Artwork of Veronica Wiese The Historic Center of Havana will be occupied by 48 artists, including Lázaro Saavedra, Fidel Garcia and the Creative City project, while the Centre for Development of Visual Arts will host the sound project by the Italian Michelangelo Pistoletto. The venues in the...

Yosmell Calderón danced in Contemporary Dance of Cuba (DCC) for nine years. He was able, during that time, understand and dance at will. Blur in solos and duets extraordinary that (we) left breathless at each exit the stage. Yosmell Calderón is, to be exact, the Compass solo and duos Ne me quitte pas de DemoN / Crazy and El Dorado. Over his career and his recent separation from the company, he says, has been vital for it served as dancer, Jabao spoke with OnCuba. "Look, the first time for dancing where’d say very slow, because I was an athlete seven years, and see that my body was interacting with another language, another way to express, with another way of seeing life, it was a shock. My life stopped in a state of feedback from other perspectives, other ways of doing things, until there came a time when my family told me: you do or not, but start and end well, and that was what I most motivated, were words of my grandfather, shocking in my world at that time. "From there I got much involved with dance, I began to understand it, love it, but every time I danced it...

Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti is a man of cinema and theater. He is, above all things, a man of theater. Not only because he makes theater with El Ingenio, no. Cremata Malberti scene is everything, from clothing to tone of voice. Even when presenting his productions and asking nicely to turn off the cell phones and not to disturb during the show, one perceives the theatricality in every pause, every intent of the word. These days, El Ingenio presents the Dutch play Cloaca, the reason for OnCuba to speak with the director. Why staging a Dutch work and why specifically Cloaca? We are always on the hunt, especially in the theater, for novel texts, unknown to the Cuban public, or revisiting texts that we always put some of Cremata or Cuba into it. In the specific case of Cloaca, is the first work that comes to us without our looking for it, but we would have gone to fetch it the same way. The Dutch embassy wanted to expand its scope and make some Dutch theater, and there was the possibility to stage Cloaca (Sewer), which is the most famous work of the most famous playwright living in Holland at...

For people of my generation, Habana Abierta was something of a myth. It was a transgressive spirit that was growing in the womb and moving up the throat just in time to scream how great a rock and roll with timba sounds. The idea of seeing them live was unthinkable until they came with Barberia, about three years ago, the first symptoms of the return. The rest is known, the concert of La Tropical in 2012 without Kelvis or Boris, true, but equally moving-, finally restored us what we had known only by hearsay. The group restored the link with the island and some of its members are heard live since then in spaces throughout Cuba. Luis Alberto Barberia is one that is here to stay and find the roots of their music again in Havana: "I always say I went for a long walk, I never left here with the intention of staying to live anywhere. I just knew I could not live and die in a place without knowing the outside, and my music also needed that. I took a long journey and not expect to get this far or work with such great people and sharing the...

The Havana World Music, from the hand of Eme Alfonso, will return this year in its second edition on February 6 and 7 at the Metropolitan Park of Havana, with the participation of musicians from eight countries. The list of the foreign guests includes French DJ Philippe Cohen Solal, one of the members of Gotan Project, the multi-instrumentalist David Walters, also from France, the Mexican Institute of Sound and Camilo Lara’s electro-folk project, one of the great references of alternative music in Latin America. The Moroccan singer Aziz Sahmaoui and his band University of Gnawa, with which he performs traditional North African music mixed with jazz and rock among other rhythms, will come from the African continent. The event shall also be attended by Spanish group Muchachito Bombo Infierno, who have made his personal style from the fusion of flamenco, funk and rock. From Cuba, the Havana World Music will offer concerts by Isaac Delgado, jazz musician Roberto Fonseca, Yusa, Tony Avila and Alain Pérez. The first edition, held in February last year, grew out from the project Para mestizar, by Eme Alfonso, on cultural diversity in our country and with the participation of major groups like Van Van, Sintesis,...

It seemed that in the 1980's the group Teatro Musical of Havana and Hector Quintero would perpetuate a genre and a tradition rooted since the Republic with Alhambra Theater. After years of silence, the corner of Consulado and Virtudes Streets is still choked with debris and thirst of applause that once shook the lunettes. Since the cease of the presentations of this company in the early 1990s, many years would pass for the Cuban stage to dream of rescuing a genre that, at most, had performed some plays on the stage -very far to be considered musicals - by José Milian, Raúl Martín, Carlos Diaz and Nelson Dorr, among other directors. An apparent 'back to musical ", starring the group Mephisto Theatre, led by the late Tony Diaz, put in Cuban stages frank imitations of Broadway blockbusters, conditioned by the budget of the National Council for the Performing Arts, the translation of parliaments and songs into Spanish and some other elements introduced in the plot to bring it closer to the national audience. Despite this, the audience applauded standing, for months, shows like Cabaret, Chicago, Cats and Grease, the latter two featuring children and directed by Alejandro Milian. If the...

¨Portraits of the Cuban School of Ballet¨ is the first exhibition in Cuba by American photographer Rebekah Bowman. Her concern with the lens to capture the dance culture, classical of the Island, now fills the walls of the José Martí Memorial, as part of the activities for the 24th International Ballet Festival of Havana. Her first camera, her first lessons in photography, thanks to a friend she met while teaching English at the Benito Juarez University of Oaxaca, Mexico. Years later she departed to live in Scotland, where she attended a photography course and sparked further her passion for this art. Rebekah Bowman But Rebekah is not, at first glance, American or European. Not even Mexican, as suggested by her accent. She has lived throughout the world and has toured with the camera in hand, her other half, and this nomadic appetite seems to have tattooed on her face and in her artist hands a single, generic human culture. "I am the sum of everything I've experienced, what I have seen and what I've done in my life. I worked as a waitress, a cook, making cakes, as administrative manager of a chamber orchestra, I have taught at the university...

Alejandro Milian goes from acting to poetry, drama, and directs all while smoking uneasy from the lunettes. At first, Alejandro sated his thirst for theater directing by working with children. Cats, Grease and Requiem for Mercedes, dedicated to his grandmother, were some of the works that he premiered with an amateur group of boys but full of passion for what they did. Without leaving his Mephisto Theatre troupe, Alejandro began working on a project approved on July 27 by the National Performing Arts as Las Mercedes Theatre Project. Apropos of this, and the invitation to participate in the IV Festival of Small Format of Miami OnCuba chatted with the young dramatist. "It's a theater project about women made ​​almost entirely by women, to address sensitive issues in this genre ever. First we premiered Mujeres de cristal , a monologue included in my book and starring Alianne Portuondo and soon we're going to release La canción de Cecilia, which will be played by Araina Begue, I authored both plays. "Women were always beaten in the theater, but we owe it to women. All playwrights should enhance its role in the Cuban scene. " Alejandro Milián What poetic would define the Las...

As every two years, the classic dance will return to Cuban scenes, between October 28 and November 7, when the National Ballet of Cuba and other dance companies in the world dance "for Shakespeare and dance" in the twenty-fourth International Ballet Festival of Havana. The event will celebrate the 450th birth anniversary of the English writer, with the staging of some of his plays made ​​into ballet, as the work Shakespeare and his masks, choreographed by Alicia Alonso and music by Charles Gounod, inspired by Romeo and Juliet, which will be presented at the opening ceremony on October 28 at the Karl Marx Theater. As usual, the public can also enjoy the classics: Giselle, Coppelia, The Sleeping Beauty and The Swan Lake, performed by the National Ballet of Cuba, in addition to shows like The magic of dance that presents the fragments of these pieces and others like Don Quixote, Nutcracker and Gottschalk Symphony. A special moment of the Festival will be dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, with the presentation of the ballet Tula inspired by the life and work of Camagüey writer, choreographed by the Prima Ballerina Assoluta and music by...

For the third time, Havana will host, from Thursday, October 9 through the 19, the British Culture Week, though they will actually display for ten days the diversity and richness of a culture that goes beyond the tea at five PM and parliamentary monarchy. For details on the activities organized by the British Embassy in our country, OnCuba spoke with Rhys Patrick, event organizer and head of its Political and Communication Section. "We are very happy to organize it, and we do it basically to share and show the depth and diversity of British culture, that is, the modern culture, not only of past centuries. We wanted to really reveal a modern, cosmopolitan, heterogeneous, open face, which is the main reason to organize a week of British Culture. "We try to get as much as possible each year, so this time is not really a week, but ten days, because we could not getthe entire program, all events, in just seven days. There will be music, theater, dance, history, science, literature, activities for children, adults, youth, British Week is for all Cubans, "he said. This event was first held on the island in 2012, to mark the 250th anniversary of...

Fifty-five years ago, the techniques of modern dance would go on the Isle of hands-and the legs of a group of young teacher called by Ramiro Guerra from the Department of Modern Dance of the National Theater of Cuba. September 25, 1959 is the official date of establishment of the company after several changes in its name would eventually be called Danza Contemporanea de Cuba (DCC), under the tutelage of Ramiro and American Burdsal Lorna, who must be considered, according to Miguel Iglesias, director of the company, as the fathers of modern dance in Cuba. From  February 19, 1960 and to date, DCC has premiered pieces ranging from the very embodiment of Afro-Cuban roots to European neoclassicism, to more postmodern, daring and disturbing creations. Working with foreign choreographers (Jan Linkens, Cathy Marston, Rafael Bonachela, Itzik Galili, etc.) has allowed them to not only include in its spectrum alien trends in modern dance, but the most vernacular molding techniques with true authenticity. Pieces like Folía Demo-N / Crazy or Mambo 3XXI have earned the company the privilege of acting in the best venues in Europe and the United States. Not to mention Compass, where they cross at once Yoruba sensuality and...

There is in the Netherlands, in addition to the weed that is freely smoked in many bars and prostitutes hovering naked in the windows of the Red Light District of Amsterdam, a gallery of Cuban art, classic art, surreal and very Cuban. Manuel Hernández Valdés The house of Karin Van Zuylen has been for just over ten years ago, Odyssey Gallery, created with his friend Carlos Casas, an artist born in Matanzas, under the concept of sharing and disseminating an art committed to solidarity, ecology, peace and love. On the walls of his home, carefully arranged, are drawings and paintings of Cuban plastic artists Julio Fleitas, Manuel Hernández Valdés and Vázquez, in addition to Carlos himself. "Odyssey Gallery has a completely different way to expose its art, Karin Van Zuylen told OnCuba. "Living with Art" is based on a home gallery or gallery inside the house, where, as a visitor, you feel a homey environment; and you can visualize how it would look all that art in your own home. " "In the Netherlands we are the only ones we have developed this concept. The idea started over ten years ago, but two years ago it became a palpable reality....

In 2010, the Cuban government established the guayabera (a loose lightweight shirt) as official outfit in diplomatic ceremonies. In Sancti Spiritus province, by the shore of the Yayabo River that splits the city in two, there is a house that, among pintucks shaping carefully arranged and catalogued shirts, treasures as much history and myths as guayaberas. Since 2012, the Quinta de Santa Elena, surrounded by stone bricked streets and the smell of the river, became the House of Guayaberas, institution that owns a collection of about 200 pieces, among shirts, documents and photographs, and champions the Cuban origins of guayaberas. Among the pieces, there are shirts of many personalities that have been donated to the collection, or that the House has been able to recover through relatives and friends. Some of them belonged to Latin American presidents such as Rafael Correa or even Raul Castro, or intellectuals and artists like Alicia Alonso, Nicolas Guillen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc. The list is as large as the myths around the origins of guayaberas, which precisely start on the shores of the Yayabo River. Ever since the Cuban government established it as official outfit in diplomatic ceremonies by Decree Law No. 279, it...

The British company Globe Theatre has proposed carving on stage in 205 countries one of the most important pieces of world drama: Shakespeare's Hamlet. The tribute, which began last April and is expected to last two years, is due to the 450th anniversary of English writer and the Mella Theater in Havana has been included in the tour. On the choice of the title for this tour, Malú Ansaldo, one of the organizers, said that "it was due to the phrase" To be or not to be " one of the most famous of Shakespeare, Hamlet is almost his more universal work, which has more performances, more versions, and is the most widely studied around the world. " Globe Theatre, whose cast is made up by 8 actors in charge of playing 24 characters in the staging under the direction of Dominic Dromgoole and Bill Buckhurst, will perform in that theater on August 7, with a dual function at 2:30 pm and 7:30 pm. On the barrier language may be for the Cubans, the producers suggested use for each scene to a synopsis in Spanish or, as has been done in Cuba in the past, the subtitle of each parliament....

Theater is about rooting out life, taking life miseries and representing them with strong voices and made-up faces. From the hardest life experiences emerge texts about pain, resignation, ridicule and fear. Juan Carlos Cremata is aware of that. He knows people enjoy listening to themselves in the voices of actors because that makes them feel not so lonely. After El Malentendido and Sleep and NuestroPueblito, Cremata staged La hijastra, by Cuban playwright Rogelio Orizondo, so that people would actually listen to themselves; but we all know what happens when life starts complaining at the top of its voice: people got offended by the unpolished reality represented, so La hijastra didn’t run for long over the stage. Today, El Ingenio brings Todo x uno to the Adolfo LLauradó Theater. This piece is made up of four monologues by Elio Fidel LópezVeláz, in a version by Cremata, where once again life is the main character in the play. «El mundo sin ellos», «El tiempo lo puede todo», «Ha muerto un héroe» and «Homenaje» are little stories, which, individually, “display an endless universo claiming for love, understanding, mostly with those people usually underestimated”. The four plots eventually mix: Pupi is Cristina’s retarded grandson;...

When in 1514 Diego Velázquez founded the Villa of the Holy Spirit, he would not guess that eight years later a colony of leaf-cutter ants banished the locals towards the banks of the river Yayabo. They say that the ten houses and a chapel that formed Pueblo Viejo fled from the appetite of the ants and their alleged penchant for devouring the navel of the newborn. They sayl that while there was no bridge of bricks, lime and goat's milk, the inhabitants of Sancti Spiritus should skim the waters of Yayabo to communicate. And the villa was filled with cobblestone streets, medieval buildings and convents, and blacks whose surname was Valle, which was the richest family in the village and judging by the motto of his coat, "no one is worthier than a Valle¨ making them the most arrogant. In 500 years, Santi Spiritus inhabitants buried Franciscan convents, fought in the bush, sew guayaberas, gave birth to a general who fought in three wars, did harvests, made Revolution, cleaned the Escambray, put together in tres to make guitars and made trova, turned the park around and then reconstructed it through archaeological findings, which threatened for weeks the agility of works...

For continuing loving each other, he and she narrate the same story everyday while trying to recall the house where their granddaughter went missing more than 30 years ago by an infertile lemon tree. The house, which was shot dead, hosted an underground printer's behind a wall that used to transpire ink, a couple expert cooks in pickling brine rabbit, a girl that used to prepare escalope and two little girls. It was in Argentina, during the dictatorship, and the grandmother’s name was Chicha Mariani. The search for that little girl, the hope, the Plaza de Mayo and the pain, will keep them alive during the play. Instrucciones para abrazar el aire (Instructions for embracing the air), by Ecuadorian theater group Malayerba, put an end on Sunday to the tenth edition of May’s Theater Festival in Havana. Arístides Vargas and Charo Francés played the six characters that take part in the piece (the grandparents, the cooks, and the neighbors) and it is impossible for the audience to choose one among them. They are fused together in and out the stage, they masterly supplement each other between laughs and tears through an exquisite script by Aristides, based on the story of...

Poem book Hojas de papel volando (Paper sheets flying), by Colombian writer and playwright Patricia Ariza, motivated Santa Clara’s Theater Study, Roxana Pineda, to create a theater piece by the same title, some sort of revelation on her rapprochement to South American life styles not only through her poems but also through her life experiences, which are pretty much the same. She is dressed in black and she seems to be mourning. She is actually not crying, but she looks sad. She conceals her grimace in wine, and when she feels words are choking her, she just sings in perfect tuning. Her name is Patricia, but it could also be Roxana, or Amanda, or Lucía, or just any woman’s name. Hojas de papel volando is, definitely a feminist poem, always passionate, sometimes nostalgic and free from excess. That is, holding back a feeling that is about to burst, laughter never gets to leave us short of breath; songs only talk about what she needs them to say. Hojas de papel volando is not present in Mayo Teatral to make people reflect, but to provoke them. Roxana feels Patricia’s hardships and politics. She reads the poem book and crumbles over a...

May, theatrical by excellence, returns for its tenth year, from the 16 to the 25, together with Casa de las Américas. This time, it's with thirteen shows that converge towards a common purpose: to reflect on the intersection between cultures, geographies and languages, because “theater distorts its borders, and we want to reflect on it," Vivian Martínez Tabares, General Curator of the event said in press conference That's why this time the proposals will overflow the boundaries of the scene to play, from the poetic texts of their shows or other forms of art such as music, dance, literature-as close to theater and cinema. The latter will allow the dialogue from El automóvil gris, designed by Mexican group Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes and based on the eponymous classic silent film of that country. For its part, Bolivia will reach the Andes put Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet of Aramburo, Teatro de los Andes and Kiknteatr respectively. But without a doubt one of the special guests will be the Ecuadorian troupe Malayerba, intercultural living example of the intersection from the origin of its own members. Created in Quito in 1980, Malayerba proposed to share a theater to express their reality with...