Performing Arts in the Zapata Swamp

The purpose of this conversation is to investigate the symbiotic framework governing art and the socionatural community where it grows and develops. Our case study will feature the unique binomial that we find in Cuba between a community arts institution (KORIMAKAO) and the unique ecosystemic, social and historical environment that propels life and meaning to the project since 1992 (the municipality of Cienaga de Zapata, about 180 kilometers south of Havana). Korimakao, with its twenty-four years of experience bringing art and aesthetic sensibility to the remotest population pockets of Cuba, aims to become pioneer Centre of Caribbean and Latin American Communitarian Art. In the language of the first Siboney nomadic inhabitants of the Zapata Swamp, 'Kori' means man and 'Macao' the arthropod that takes refuge in the shells of certain mollusks. There we go, Korimakao, a semisedentary living organism, fusion performing arts school (theater, dance, music) consisting of over 80 young artists, who every summer during the months of July and August, and not unlike Lorca’s legendary La Barraca travelling theatre, take their backpacks and their idiosyncratic stagings on a tour across the eighteen communities that make up the Zapata Swamp, delving into the identitarian and ecological roots of their beholders

Art · Conversation · Dance · Institution · Meaning (existential · Population · Social science · Sociology · Swamp · The arts · Visual arts · Communication · Cuban History and Society · Demography · History · Psychology · Ecology

• Trumpets in the Mountains

  Elizabeth Kath•Journal of Iberian and Latin…•2014

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