Yo Cantaré – Women’s Voices in Puerto Rican Music and Art

Tickets: $16 Advance / $20 Door / Children under 12: $5 Advance / $10 Door (Please note: There is a $2 credit card fee at the door per ticket.)
Doors open 7:30pm / Performance starts 8pm

Women in traditional folk arts from Latin America have been pushing the envelope of what it means to be a woman, more specifically, a woman artist.

With the support of the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA’s) Artworks program, La Peña Cultural Center is presenting a 4-part concert series that explores timeless archetypes of womanhood in music and dance, with the participation of women artists from the Mexican, Puerto Rican, Peruvian and contemporary Latino artistic traditions. Throughout this series, artists call attention to universal symbols of women that exist across society and cultures, and how these timeless archetypes of femininity have evolved and are still manifested in our contemporary society, expressing the essence of womanhood in sometimes conflicting but always creative ways. Dozens of Bay Area artists bring to the stage age-old stories and experiences that reach to the fiber of our humanity and honor the historic presence of women’s leadership in the promotion of cultural traditions.

Part 2: Yo Cantaré – Women’s Voices in Puerto Rican Music and Art 

Yo Cantaré explores some of the dominant archetypes of womanhood in Puerto Rican folklore, popular culture and history with a cast of musicians, artists and poets from the Bay Area Bomba y Plena Workshop, La Mixta Criolla and Aguacero.

Through a multidisciplinary repertoire featuring new original works as well as original arrangements and choreographies of traditional pieces, the various ways in which women have been represented in the Puerto Rican popular and historiographical imagination will be examined and critically questioned. Specific characters from the folklore and historical experience of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean will provide a point of departure and inspiration for the creation of these works: Anaiso, Julia de Burgos, Sylvia Rexach, Luisa Capetillo, La Lupe, Las Hermanas Mirabal, Rita Indiana, among others.

The concert will consist of musical, choreographic and spoken word pieces tied together by the overarching voice of the “cantaora”. The cantaora is a central character/role in the centuries old Afro-Puerto Rican musical tradition of Bomba. The cantaora is the lead female vocalist that calls the song(s) to be sung and danced by the community that gathers around the “batey” or space where the “bombazo” or “fiesta de bomba,” the bomba gathering, takes place. By carefully reading the energy and collective rhythm of the Bomba gathering the cantaora calls for songs that best adjust and channel that energy toward a positive and fulfilling collective experience; one that uplifts, heals, strengthens the community.

Led by the powerful voice of the cantaora, itself a central Puerto Rican archetype of feminine power and wisdom, the concert will elaborate on a series of representations the feminine in Puerto Rican culture and history: the spiritual mentor, the community leader and activist, the poet, the freedom fighter, the lover, the nurturing mother.

Artistic Direction: Shefali Shah and Hector Lugo

NEA Series Creative Director: María de la Rosa

Doors open 6:30pm / Event starts 7pm

Tickets: $16 Advance / $20 Door / Children under 12: $5 Advance / $10 Door

(Please note: There is a $2 credit card fee at the door per ticket.)

SAVE THE DATE FOR FUTURE CONCERTS IN THIS SERIES:
March 7. 2019 – Golondrina – Andanzas por California (Women at the Border)
June TBA, 2019 – Las Peteneras (Women of Mexico)