miércoles, 29 de abril de 2009

May Pilgirmage: a Reivindicated Tradition

By Amauris Betancourt.

The Franciscan fray Antonio de Alegría started the pilgrimage tradition in Holguín in 1790. The Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS), the juvenile organization of the artistic vanguard of the Island, and students of the university of Holguín, re-vindicates the May Pilgrimage a little more than two centuries later in a secularization process whose motto, left behind by the Holguín scientific Juan Manuel Guash del Monte, was “… because there is not today without yesterday ”.

Then, in the beginning, the festivity was only religious; next it gets a popular tinge. Today it is an artistic melting pot even though culture extended to streets can hardly reveal the few religious services by those who go on a pilgrimage to pay for promises or to worship.

There was not that flight of stairs dying at the top of the Hill of the Cross two centuries ago. It is perhaps a makeshift and a denial to the Tower of Babel. But this joins in culture and that was used as an alibi to misunderstanding.

In the beginning the cross was carried all the way up on shoulders and then town people gradually got together in the skirts of the Cerro Bayado, now Hill of the Cross, to dance, to drink rum, to fight rooster. Now people drink, dance and listen to music after the pilgrimage, where fellow country-men and foreigners played a lead role on the streets of the city full of art like the perfect language of consensus.

Although some prefer not to refer to it as a popular party, it really is, but charged significantly with art. The idea conceived by Cuban moviemaker Humberto Solás in the Gibara International Non-Budget Film Festival had already turned out well in the May Pilgrimages: to bring together different arts in a single festival.

Many events within the May Pilgrimages account for it: the event of Dance in Public city-scapes, the street theater, the performance of artists, the Babel Visual Arts event. The film industry with The Blue Chamber, or investigations in the theoretic event Our Memory. Or the Ibero American Handicraft Fair or that sublime trouba gathering at the Martyrs Forest in the Calixto García Revolución Square, to which people arrive in a singular procession pre-pilgrimage.

It is a massive and cosmopolitan meeting this year, devoted to Montreal, a province from Canada. The biggest delegation comes from there which renders quite important because jazz music comes along with too. Jazz music was not heard that much down here. Vic Vogel, famous jazz player, heads several jazz talents from the French-speaking part of Canada. And from there come visual art school students to share creations and ideas.

Mexico, Spain, Hunduras, South Africa, Chile, Japon… are represented too. Over 32 countries are present in this Holguín pilgrimage and right now foreign invited guests add up to 300 people who can not help aiming at invading public spaces to first-hand welcome, and share with, occasional and habitual city passers-by.

The May Pilgrimage take a walk between tradition and modernity. Its dynamics has a start in the new part of the city to reach the side where the ritual from Fray Antonio de Alegría was born, inspired in the bible passage related to Constantino the Great’s mother, the Hill of the Cross, but today people carry the Holguín Ax on shoulders instead of the cross to remember so the native population. Transition emerges half the way down the week and gives in to modernity. The ax then comes down the Hill and is hoisted way up over one of the the 18-story building located in the place was the city is younger.In such a great effort organization must be safeguarded so the Pilgrimages can make it longer. The Festival participant number will grow with seriousness and the hope to turn it into a World Festival of Young Artists will be more concrete and plausible.

martes, 28 de abril de 2009

VII Gibara Humberto Solás International Low-Budget Film Festival's Awards

By Amauris Betancourt.

Cuba, Spain and Chile got the most important prizes in the VII Humberto Solás International Film Festival in Gibara, according to the results made public in the closing ceremony in the Jiba movie from this northeastern beautiful coastal Cuban city in Holguín province.

Dear Bamako, by Omer Oke and Txari Llorente, from Spanish got the full-length fiction film award.

The Cuban moviemaker Enrique Pineda Barnet with The Annunciation; and Fernanda Aljaro and Felipe del Rio, from Chile with the The Super made it in the best rough cut fiction film.

And The Chattered Gods (Cuba), by Ernesto Daranas, got the Public's Special Great Award and Special Mention from the foreign press shared with Querida Bamako, by Omer Oke and Txari Llorente, from Spain.

More Prizes

martes, 21 de abril de 2009

Carlos Varela Begins National Tour in Holguín

By Leandro Estupiñán / Sunday, April 19, 2009. leandro@ahora.cu.
Photos: Amauris Betancourt.
It happened in the Marqueta Square; there was a red ceramics factory many years ago, a concert hall to-be now. I thought the place inappropriate, but I was wrong. The spot proved to be rather small for a national tour starting concert which will take troubadour Carlos Varela along to 12 other places in Cuba. Today, Sunday April 19, he will be in Gibara, in the Humberto Solás International Non-Budget Film Festival, where he has been, year in year out, to return his affection and friendship to his late friend moviemaker Humberto Solás, who passed away last September 2008.

Varela wore black (as he always does) and had five talented musicians keep him company. Singer Diana Fuentes sticks out. Down, before the stage, a sea of young people (teenagers and thirty-and-odds people) and some other from different ages. The first song was 25 thousand lies on the truth. The last The woodcutter without forest, a usual request from fans included in his CD Like a fish (1995).

The first time I listened to Carlos Varela, Like a fish was an underground hit. He was not played in the radio when I got to Havana in 1995 for the second time. Varela had a handkerchief to cover his hair and held a cup at the height of the nose. With a hand, he covered the mouth of the container inside which a fish swam.
The poster, on a street lamp post in Reina street, promoted a concert and, according to what I knew many years later, it had turned out to be legendary due to the crowd it brought together and because, for the first time, he was thrown coins at when singing Coins to the air as a promotion to the video clip where the very Grethel, the muse whom Varela saw through Jim Morrison's eyes, was dancing. It had happened almost one year before.

I found that poster many times those days. The CD Like a fish rendered a successful production with fabulous songs like Small dreams, Family pictures, Habaname or Like an angel. He included also harsh criticisms to Cuban reality like Politics does not fit in the sugar bowl or The woodcutter without forest.
It was not difficult to understand why his songs were radioed, “only sometimes”, (if by any chance they were radioed in the nineties), even though his friend and protector Silvio Rodríguez had said that “the ones plotting against Carlos Varela erred, because they think him very hypercritical."

The troubadour questions the world around him, but his criticism is based on a hypersensitivity that seems to get hold of him. He sings to an amusement park tearing apart, to the city getting destroyed, to a misunderstood young girl, to a relative fleeing the country, to contradictions landing on his nose and, next, he warns:If you knew the pain I feel when I sing to you and you do not understand this love”. It has been thus since Jalisco Park (1989) where he included themes like Guillermo Tell or Tropicollage and where you can notice the personality of someone born in April 1963, four years after 1959.A curious thing turned out to me with Varela. When I got to Havana to major in journalism in 2 000, I ran into the old poster that had confronted me with the musician. Then, he was launching Clouds (2 000), a CD that, although with dreadful songs like Walls and doors, he seemed to me stepping backwards, a capitulation in his background as an artist and reality iconoclast. Maybe I believed Varela had fallen down because I only liked that song out of Clouds.

It was logical, I thought: The hardest years seemed to have gone, and with them all poetical Carlos Varela's amphibology met an end. I was mistaken again. He came out with Seven (2 003) and so dreadful lyrics like the one adorning the melody in Behind the window-glass, a song where he came back stabbing us with a cold and cruel sensibility shouting:The ones that fled cry, the ones that stay cry more”.
That was the Carlos Varela I had always been interested in. The troubadour whose lyrics of love stem from reality and its symbols and circumstances. Now, after having turned 46, he has started this national tour to promote his new work, entitled It is not the end. It is not either for his career: He is a mature man; Voice and fans keep him company. Last night (Saturday, April 18), the Marqueta Square was full with young people singing his songs. And I discovered him in a poster, stuck on a Havana street lamp post in the nineties!The image in the poster stayed there, two or three years right after the XXI century had already begun. I remember they were four pieces of a scratched paper surviving time when I saw it last. I was heading down Reina street to do something I do not remember, while a man sold orange juice nearby the street lamp post. He knew those things were not big things, but they were his dreams. What was it supposed be done about it?

martes, 14 de abril de 2009

Inauguration Day from VII Humberto Solás Non-Budget Film Festival in Gibara

By José Miguel Ávila.
Photos: Amauris Betancourt.
Sergio Benvenuto, Film Festival director, reading inauguration words.

The usual participants inauguration parade, the fireworks, the movie screening of Humberto Solás’ A November’s Day (1972), and the inauguration concert by afro-rock group Síntesis marked out the first day of the VII Humberto Solás Non-Budget International Film Festival in Gibara.









lunes, 13 de abril de 2009

Gibara, the Crabs's White Village

By Amauris Betancourt.
Gibara, the beautiful coastal head city from the municipality named likewise in the province of Holguín, at Cuban Northeastern, was founded back in January 16, 1817. It is also known as the White Village.
Gibara is noted for its history, culture and its biodiversity in its flora and fauna, in addition to the architecture that turned it into National Monument in 2004.The railroad, introduced in 1893 from Holguín, brought Gibara commercial prosperity. It lives now on cattle raising, agriculture, fishing and tourism.

The city, – with its generous, solidary, affectionate and a little proud people -75 thousand inhabitants spread in 630 square Km.–, hosts every year, since 2002, the International Non-Budget Film Festival founded by deceased Cuban moviemaker Humberto Solás.

Calixto García park, old military square.

A replica from the Statue of Liberty, in the center of the Calixto García park, dedicated to mothers.The Museum for Colonial Arts among the most important collections of the country. The Parish Church embedded in the Calixto Garcia park.
The Batería Fernando VII turned Gibara into the second walled city in Cuba to protect the city against the attacks of corsairs and pirates.

Gibara Bay houses a port since 1822.

Recently, the overnight from September 7, 2008, an ungrateful guest destroyed The Village Blanca: the hurricane Ike.

JotaCruz wins Prizes in First Photonature Contest

By Amauris Betancourt.

Juan Miguel Cruz Gómez, JotaCruz, won the first and second prizes in the First Photonature Contest, Holguín 2009, while Raciel Cruz Peña, from the new generation of photographers, got the third award, made public during the inauguration ceremony at the Electa Arenal ward from the city Art Center. The series Life in the Birama Wet Lowland, by JotaCruz, depicts –in excellent compositions, from different angles and in the right moment- different places and species from Birama Wet Lowland at the province of Granma. Biodiversity, the second rewarded piece by the same creator, approaches, in portraits, endemic birds from the area of Cupeycillo, located at the municipality of Gibara. The photographer feasts on the beauty and charisma of these endemic birds turning the area into a meeting place for scientists, photographers, painters, naturalists and birders.

Raciel Cruz Peña got the third award with Equilibrium, where he goes beyond the natural hedonism of our Cuban fauna and the use of good photographic technique, to a symbiotic message of communion between human beings and animals on Earth. The jury board, presided by Nils Navarro and made up besides of photographers Amaurys González and Juan Pablo Carreras, awarded too four Mentions: Carlos Alberto Ferrá for A day after, and to Luis Catalá Gurri, William Lucas Rodríguez and Alexander Sánchez Rivas for their works Hope Nets, The alert spectator and First Steps, respectively.

Nils Navarro, the photocontest president, decided to acknowled the support from Trimagen and Photo Service in the printing process. He also stated his desire to have a yearly Photonature Contest to call society’s eye on the protection of the environment and the Cuban flora and fauna.

The exhibit hosts 61 photographic works from 32 professional and amateur photographers including visual art students. It will be open to the public for a month and will be shown next in Gibara during The Community Festival “Protecting Birds” from May 18 to 24 sponsored by several national and international institutions.

sábado, 4 de abril de 2009

Holguín Closes Successfully Classical Music Festival

Text and photos: Amauris Betancourt.

The large audience packing the Ismaelillo movie-theater to enjoy the closing ceremony of the XXVI Classical Music Festival approves the claim of having a concert hall, in the building currently, in Holguín city. Several people could enjoy the concert but had no seats in a room that turned out too small for such a Festival held yearly.

However, such a statement is not based on space availability but on the growing quality of Holguín musicians, ranked among the best nationwide, according to some noted figures attending the Festival like Frank Fernandez, Honorary President, maestro Guido Lopez-Gavilán, vice-president, and the absent guitarist Leo Brower, National Movie Prize.

The event’s closing ceremony started with a special tribute to pianist Frank Fernandez, born in the city of Mayarí, Holguin province.


The Holguín Symphonic Orchestra (OSH in Spanish), headed by Orestes Saavedra, opened the musical banquet with the interpretation of Vals Cubano (Cuban Waltz).

Then the OSH invited Colombian cellist Laura Ospina first and Italian clarinet player Ivan Petruzziello later to play with.

The OSH’s general director, Harold Ricardo Corella, had already praised Petruzziello in a press conference: “He is young but very talented."

Mexico joined in with maestro Marco Natanael Espinosa as director and soprano Alejandra Lopez who interpreted “Piensa en mi” (Think of me) by Mexican composer Agustin Lara.

Then Alejandra sang “Jurame” (Swear), accompanied by Cuban tenor Yunior Galano, a piece by also Mexican composer Maria Greever. Maestro Natanael Espinosa was given a warm welcome by the audience.

The Gala had an excellent closing with maestro Guido Lopez-Gavilan’s Guagancó, Orfeón Holguin and the Codanza dance company dancing it.

"Music has been without a doubt the queen of the Classical Music Festival in Holguin…," said Jorge Luis Sanchez Grass, the artistic general director. Each edition overcomes precedent ones, and ideas and dreams hardly stop but go on far from being utopian. Let’s see what will happen next year.

Then we are in debt with Harold Ricardo Corella, one of the most important figures in the organization of the event these last years. God willing, we will have more room next year, because the La Periquera Museum is too small for such a big event as the the Classical Music Festival.

viernes, 3 de abril de 2009

Tribute to Cuban pianist Frank Fernández

Text and photos: Amauris Betancourt.

Cuban Pianist Frank Fernández was paid homage to at the La Periquera Solenm Hall as one of the activities of the XXVI National Classical Music Concert Festival, for his half a century of artistic life accompanied by success nationally and internationally.The Orfeón Holguín Choir played two works: “Vertigo of rain”, Frank's text and music by Guido López Gavilán, and “Dream that sings the breeze.”The Pizzicato Quartet played a version of Ausencia, written by A. Villalón.Next soprano Norkristián García sang The Afternoon from Sindo Garay.Karla Martínez, to the piano, and Frank Ernesto Fernández at the oboe.Harold Ricardo joined in with his violin with Sequence of Solitude and Rebirth in January, this last a homage to the Cuban Revolution by Frank Fernández.The Holguín Chamber Orchestra, Karla, Frank Ernesto, and Ellis Regina in Adagio for the Oboe, Cello, Cuerdas and organ from G. Zipolli.At the end the Raúl Gómez García art school infantile choir closed.A special Recognition was given to Frank: “Things like these can not be thanked with words”, he said filled with emotion, heading for the piano and did it in the language he knows better.