As I said in my last post, Emily and I are loving Guanajuato, in large part because we have arrived just in time for the last week of the 36th annual International Cervantes Festival. The festival began so many years ago with a group of student actors performing entremeses, or short plays/skits, by Cervantes. It has grown into a large festival for all sorts of art: theater, dance, music, cinema, and visual arts. And the festival also now features performers from around not only Mexico but the rest of the world as well. If you're ever in the middle of Mexico in October, this is the place to visit.
We arrived on Sunday (following an incredibly luxe bus ride) and after getting our dorm room at the school, we headed into the Centro Historico to partake in the action of the festival. We didn't go to any performances our first day, taking the opportunity to epxlore the narrow winding streets of Guanajuato and to see some of the street performances taking place around every turn. We came across clowns, sword fights, a bit of acting, and plenty of music. The festival was in full swing, especially given that it was a Sunday, and we got to jump right into the thick of it. We couldn't wait to start seeing some of the actual events.
The first of our events was on Monday night, and we headed back downtown after our first day of school (which we'll talk more about another time) to have dinner and wander around some more before the show. Some of that wandering included an amusing stop in the Guanajuato Wax Museum, where we were given a tour of the various small, eclectic rooms. The first room was typical, including representations of some local heroes of the uprising against the Spaniards (and the heroes' decapitated heads in the four corners). It got more surprising from there. In the hallway were wax figures of two children behind one of those airport barrier ropes, and our guide proceeded to tell us a story about how the kids had come to live in the house now occupied by the museum. After a bit of history, the guide told us that the house was said to still be haunted by their souls, and she then unsnapped the barrier rope which snapped across the open space and startled the heck out of us. After a few more innocuous rooms (one including Jesus Christ and the last Pope, another inexplicably including Sean Connery and Tom Cruise), we entered a dark room filled with sculptures made to look like corpses in various states of gruesomeness. After a couple more (partly-successful) attempts to startle us, our tour concluded. It wasn't anything like what we were expecting, but was certainly an amusing way to pass the 15 minutes we spent there.
Back to the festival, our first show (we got tickets to four separate events well in advance, while we were still in Oaxaca) was a performance of ballet folklorico by the University of Guanajuato dance group. The performance was amazing. Among beautifully-choreographed dances with colorful costumes from all over the country (and going well back in time to pre-Hispanic Mexicans), were several highlights. For one, we were treated to an actual cock fight as part of one of the dances. We definitely didn't see that coming. The announcer announced la pelea de los gallos, which we figured to be some sort of traditional dance, but which turned out to be exactly what the announcer said. Two young men carried roosters out from opposite sides of the stage, and after first letting them get close enough to peck at each other a few times, the men released the roosters and the feathers quite literally began to fly. No blood was (visibly shed), and the two cock fights included in the dancing were both reassuringly short, but I don't think anyone could have put up an announcement saying that no animals were harmed in the making of this particular production.
The other highlight, and my new favorite dance of all time, was a dance called El Torito from the city of Silao, very close to Guanajuato. You'll have to imagine along with me to have an idea of how this wild and crazy performance develops. It starts with a bull on the stage (actually a man dressed all in white wearing on his head a mask shaped like a whole bull with space cut out in part of the bull's chest so the dancer can see. The bull is visibly enraged, and a series of characters, all wearing costumes and masks, comes out on the stage to try their hand at calming the bull down (one of our conversation teachers gave us a complete explanation the following day of the various characters--still, the dance was fun to watch even without knowing the full story). First comes the ranch manager riding his horse (actually a small horse head on the front of his belt and a small horse but on the back), who eventually gets chased off by the bull into the audience area. Next comes the manager's assistant, similarly attired and similarly run off into the audience. Soon to follow are a beautiful young woman who we have been told is the ranch owner's daughter, who thinks she can calm the bull down with her beauty. She gets run off, too. Following the young woman in no particular order are the ranch owner (wearing a mask with a long ugly nose and carrying a foppy cane), an older, staggering drunk woman (the owner's wife), and an old man stooped over his cane (who is supposed to be able to use his superior wisdom of years to help calm the bull). As the various characters are chased into the audience, they continue running around the audience, at times chasing after each other, at other times flirting or dancing with audience members. Eventually into the picture also come the devil and Death. The flirting, chasing, dancing, and bull-fighting carry on for quite some time, much to the delight of everyone in the audience (and we were sitting in the third row, so we got a great view of much of the good audience interaction). What eventually happens, as is the cycle of life, is that all of the chaos is ended as Death picks off the characters one by one until they're all dead. It's highly entertaining, and because I can't possibly do the thing justice with just words, here's a video from YouTube, and I invite you to explore more on your own to get a better sense of the thing:
So, we were incredibly pleased with our first official event of the festival. Tuesday night we also wandered downtown, but didn't find as much of interest. On our way out of the centro, we came across an event that was about to start, so we grabbed a seat. The event was slated as some sort of multidimensional concert, featuring a conjunction of contemporary music performers playing simultaneously from Mexico, Ireland, and the US. Unfortunately, as it turned out, that interesting-sounding part of the show was not set to start until much later, and we were already tired. What we did see was a strange performance where two artists essentially composed a real-time movie soundtrack on their computer for this bizarre silent film featuring priests and some sort of Satanic rituals that was playing in the background. We were not getting it, and the music was strange, and given that we were both sleepy anyway, we decided not to stick around from the multi-location concert happening later in the night, as interesting as that sounded.
We didn't end up seeing anything yesterday, due to other chores (e.g., laundry) that demanded our attention. But tonight we are going to see Pilobolus, a well-known contemporary dance group that is supposed to be amazing and that Emily has been dying to see. So, we're looking forward to that. Tomorrow we're heading to nearby Leon to see an innovative Mexican percussion group called Tambuco. And Saturday we have tickets for a play by Mexican poet Octavio Paz, called La Hija de Rappaccini. So, lots of fun stuff on the horizon, and we'll fill you all in the down the line.
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