A Fire Within: CubaCaribe Festival of Dance & Music
- Kristen Cosby
- Jun 26
- 15 min read
Updated: Jun 30
March 29-April 4, 2025, San Francisco, CA
At the finale of A Fire Within, the 19th CubaCaribe Festival of Dance & Music, a panel of choreographers from this year’s showcase gathered at Casa de Carnaval Indigenous Peoples Cultural Arts Healing Center to reflect on the festival this year, and to speak about what inspires them to keep putting work onstage during this particular moment of struggle.
The festival’s artistic director, Ramón Ramos Alayo, spoke of the showcase’s continued mission to represent the different cultures of the Caribbean and its diaspora, while creating community through dance. He also spoke of the joy of seeing different bodies and different generations of students participating in dance forms that weren’t regularly being taught in the Bay area when he first arrived in San Francisco in 1997. When asked specifically what inspires him, his hand gestured to the varied circle of choreographers, board members, attendees, and dancers gathered together, and said simply, “It’s this. This is what inspires me.”
This year’s festival brought together seven different pieces, each displaying a unique dance tradition or fusion of Afro-Puerto Rican bomba, Brazilian, modern, West African, Afro-Haitian, Afro-Cuban, Mexican son huasteco, Cuban salsa, rumba, son, and changüí-pilón-timba, occasionally with a bit Bay area flavor thrown into the mix.
As part of the panel discussion, each choreographer expressed a desire to bring people closer to a specific cultural experience and history, both through teaching and choreographing, and by bringing these works to the stage. They also spoke of the many challenges to their work, and the layers of resistance they’ve encountered in maintaining these dance traditions and creating new pieces year after year: denied visas, lack of funding, the expense of rehearsal space, and the harassment of neighbors. In this year’s program, their resistance to those challenges was embedded in every piece – fires are lit, swords are drawn, a “Karen” is shouted, a dance traditionally reserved as an act of rebellion is performed in joy, a female drummer performs a role traditionally reserved for men, a private spiritual dance is transformed into a near-operatic drama. In this way, the audience became part of the resistance, simply by witnessing their movements, and attending a joyous performance that our current administration would likely condemn, or even forbid, if it could.
“Dance can say and speak what a politician cannot do,” Deborah Vaughan, Artistic Director of Dimensions Dance Theater noted. “It has power. Yes, it has power. It motivates people. It inspires. People learn through what dance is presenting. That’s why artists get no respect… … They're trying to suppress the voices of the audience and the artists. They're already doing that with the journalists. So, I think that the time is now. Create, create, create – whether it's dance, whether it's music, whether it's poetry, whether it's film, photography. Now is the time. We cannot let the powers that be silence us. We have to keep it going, because we are here. We are here.”
The result was a colorful, passionate display of traditions and innovative fusions, and a joyous call to arms that quite literally brought light into the darkness.
Eternal Flame; from sparks to fire!
Folklo Ayisyen Lakay
Artistic Direction/Choreography: Laurie Fleurentin
Eternal Flame begins with fire. A woman carries a plate of flame to center stage. The room is dark and in the flame's flicker we see the outlines of flags carried aloft. Women gather. Drummers flank the group. Eight dancers half-encircle the fire and begin to clap. The rhythm is Dogi, a Creole rhythm calling the spirits into the space. A woman begins to sing as the flags are carried offstage. They bear the Haitian colors and those of Ézili Dantò, the goddess and fierce protector of women and children. It’s good that she is being summoned, for they need her.
The women grab the hems of their long pink skirts and flare them like wings, their faces serious. The drums pick up along the vocals, and the women begin to lift and drop the edges of their ruffles in unison as they semi-circle the fire. This fire represents Petwo, a call to fight for justice and what is right. The five drummers and three singers increase the volume and tempo of the beat, and the dancers fling their arms upward, right and left, whipping the cloth of their skirts side to side. Sometimes they seem to pull things from the earth or whip their heads between earth and sky to connect the two.
Their arms fling faster and higher, their bodies bow lower, hair whips quicker as the vocals and drums intensify. These are strong arms. Their fists clenched. Feet pound the earth in solid steps. In a precarious moment, the dancers balance on their heels and stomp backwards in tiny circles.
The ensemble moves offstage and a soloist, Laurie Fleurentin, kneels before the fire in near darkness. The drum beat shifts to Petwo, the rhythm that calls for war or revolution in the pursuit of justice. The summoner bows, rises, and shimmies her shoulders over the flame. She remains kneeling before the fire, her torso and arms thrashing. Suddenly, she pulls a whistle from the flames, puts it to her lips, blows, and the drums change rhythm once more.
The ensemble pours back onstage – now in short skirts of purple and green with adorning butterflies – whipping flimsy scarves. The fire vanishes and the drummers shift to Kòy, the rhythm of celebration after fighting and achieving justice. The tight defensive circle is gone, now the dancers move in open lines. Knees jerk higher and movement gets wilder and leggier. Their limbs flung in joy. The director’s staccato whistle adds to the drum’s rhythm and commands direction changes like a carnival parade. It's a luminous celebration, one that we might all hope to be part of after triumphing over evil.
Cachita Te Quema, Rueda Con Ritmo
Artistic Direction/Choreography: Sidney Weaverling & Ryan Mead
A line of women in gold lame bikinis, hot pants, ruffled sleeves and long trains parade onto the stage in a diagonal line like showgirls. They lift their trains like wings and shimmy their shoulders. We are entering a nightclub in Havana. They welcome us with glamour and joy. They are here to tempt, to entertain, with provocative moves, and exposed cleavage, tummies, and legs. They are followed by a line of men who line the stage behind them, often standing in observation. What follows is a mass seduction, a tribute to the Yoruba goddess of love, Ochún, who represents femininity and sensuality, and Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba. In this way, the indigenous spiritual practices of Cuba and its Catholic traditions are both incorporated in Cachita Te Quema, which Artistic Director Sidney Weaverling has blended with popular Cuban dance forms.
A trio of dances is tucked inside this piece, each expressing a different Cuban rhythm and each celebrating a different moment or space of female seduction, all linked by bright yellow and white costumes. The first is Cachita, which begins with a guaracha-son, a competitive, playful dance between showgirls and their onstage, male audience. The men vanish, the showgirls flick their trains in a cabaret performance. They perform the salsa steps in a circular pattern. They kneel and shake their arched torsos backwards, baring thighs and stomachs to the spotlight. The energy from the music drives the formation forward, but the steps and movement onstage are often languid, as if the temperature were too hot to move quickly.
Next, the men, clad in white pants and yellow shirts, hang out as if in front of a late-night club, jostling, joking and waiting. The women approach in tight clubbing clothes, yellow and white. Desire becomes theatrical and partners perform salsa-steps in formation. The women dominate the downstage while the men move in a line upstage, stepping in rhythm and making grand gestures with arms and legs on the downbeat. The women’s steps are tiny and mincing, their hips carving wide arcs. Then they drop and bounce their butts against their heels. The men are performatively eager. When the ladies flaunt their tails, the gentlemen humorously fall over backwards. They circle the women and pair off, shifting from a line to a grid formation into a circle, where partners switch and change.
Finally, the women return in frocks and men in golf caps. It's a day-time scene of partnered dance, all in a circle. Skirts are knee length. Gentlemen keep their ogling repressed. The seduction complete, the dancers wave and leave the stage as if leaving a party.
Madness, Dimensions Dance Theater
Artistic Direction, Choreography: Deborah Vaughan & Alseny Soumah
A simple double-strike of a drum echoes through the silence. Boom. Boom. Spotlit center stage is a man in a red and black diamond patterned outfit, an elder with grizzled dreadlocks. His face bears a piercing concern as he gazes at the audience. The two drum beats ricochet through his body with a gunshot. Boom. Boom. He lifts his hands toward the audience as if offering water. Beside him three drummers make the rhythms that move his frame.
Two other dancers join him while the rhythm and movement intensify. They are agitated and defiant. They bend and look down at their stomping feet and nod rapidly at the ground before snapping suddenly upright. Boom. Boom. The sound jerks through their bodies as if possessing or torturing them. The three dancers rotate on and off stage: sometimes a trio, sometimes a duo, and sometimes a solo woman alone in distress. Her hands raise to ears to block the sound, and wave as if to clear away an irritation. Her movements repeat, growing frantic.
Directors Vaughn and Soumah have merged modern dance and West African traditions in this piece to create a distressing present: an unseen, incomprehensible, chaotic world surrounds these bodies. We are witnesses to their struggle to survive.
All six dancers gather on stage, still in agitation, still being moved by the two-strike. The grizzled man stalks through them, gazing at the audience with the same perturbing stare. The dancers cluster center-stage reaching for the sky, for walls, for each other, for someone or something to hold onto. They continue to reach outward in silence as darkness falls. A female voice-over speaks: “...how to break the shackles? How to find the North Star? How to proudly walk down the potholed road our ancestors first gleaned?” Which might describe diaspora or exodus, or perhaps, simply how to function in the world we all woke up to this morning.
The drum shifts to doundounba, a West African rhythm defined by the artists as “a shared pulse, that unites us all.” The drumming intensifies, growing, more layered and complex as the dancers’ gestures grow larger. They circle counterclockwise, open into lines, repeating their movements, hand clapping overhead, heads and torsos bow forward and back towards the circle’s center, knees lifting, feet flex, limbs moving grandly in a united rhythm as the dancers begin to grin. Their movement has become more defined, geometric, organized, and unified. They are not possessed, or tortured; they are in full command of themselves and exuberant. The drum beats which have moved through them like a heartbeat now pulses the air with energy, and we are brought forth from madness into joy.
Son Huasteco: Tradición Hidalguense, Los Lupeños de San José
Artistic Direction, Choreography: Samuel Cortez Balderas & Alfredo Luna
From the ensemble’s opening yips and cheers, it's clear we are in celebration, as if we’d traveled to a rural community in the mountains of Hidalgo, Mexico, a state known for its rich history of folk dance, for a village festival. The ensemble walks forth in pairs, dressed in folk costumes designed by artisans from Jaltocan Hidalgo: men in matching white pants and shirts with straw hats, women in white blouses trimmed with flowers and long bright skirts, with colorful crown headdresses and long gray shawls.
The dancers’ upper bodies remain firm and stiff, while their feet move quickly in staccato steps. They move into two large concentric circles divided by gender, before pairing off again into duos for their stage-pounding, fast footwork. Though the couples rarely touch, joy and passion vibrate through their heels into the floor, rattling the theater’s seats. To the untrained eye, it might look and sound like flamenco, but this is huapango – a regional folk dance built from two traditions: fandango from Spain and son huasteco, a folk dance that originated in the Huasteca region of Mexico.
The women, despite their elaborate crowns, curiously wrap their long gray shawls over their colorful headdresses at first like turbans, then later fold them and balance them atop their heads. Then, in a stunning move of coordinated cat’s-cradle, the outer circle of men moves into the circle of women and then out again, weaving the scarves into a twelve-pointed star or knot seemingly by magic. The inner circle rotates the elaborate knot slowly, then dissolves the sculpture, and the shawls become mere shawls once more. Later, only men remain on stage performing a unison line, again with arms stiff at their sides and feet tapping rapidly. The women sneak up behind them, whirling their shawls into ropes. In a final playful move, the ladies entrap their partners in their shawls and pretend to ride them around the stage like horses drawing charioteers around a ring.
But if one speaks too much about the shawls, one betrays the footwork. What’s phenomenal about Los Lupeños de San José is the precision and synchronicity of their unison. Their footwork is so practiced, fast and loud, and occurs beneath such calm faces, that it seems effortless. Artistic Director Samual Cortez Balderas attributes this to the many dancers who began performing with the company as children and who’ve continued into adulthood. When he first formed the company in 1969, most young people eventually moved on, now they stay and work to display their cultural heritage onstage. While moments of this piece celebrate couples, and groupings of women and men, the use of these bodies to form one giant knot made of cloth shows that it takes an entire community, and faith in dance and tradition, to build such sculptures.
El Poder Del Tambor, Herenica Guantanamera
Artistic Direction, Choreography: Royland Lobato, Dennis Bain Savigne
El Poder Del Tambor tells the story of a chief, a storm, a village and drum. We are in a village in Cuba, perhaps, and though the music, dance traditions, and clothing belong to that region, the story being told is set long ago in Africa, a story brought to the Caribbean as a memory, in bodies stolen from their homelands.
A man, choreographer and director Royland Lobato, brings forth a large drum and sets it center stage. He wears a long, white fringed poncho. Onstage, he is Chief Kofi, a man of legend, and the drum is a sacred instrument, called Mama Tambu, believed to hold the spirits of the ancestors. The villagers in this dance are all women, dressed in white puffy blouses, vibrant skirts, their heads wrapped in bright kerchiefs.
The women frown, feet spread wide, they jerk their shoulders up and down rapidly, sometimes facing each other in pairs, sometimes turning outward. Perhaps signaling trouble coming. The rhythm is rapid, and the layering of different beats keeps the air edgy and enervating. The drumming and vocals emerge from upstage where a cello, four drummers and four singers bring the mood and rhythm of Mama Tambu to life. A soloist chants a verse, followed by a long chorus call from the others. They change formation, moving their feet in a repeated forward-and-back step that turns in all directions, while their arms fling repeatedly upward or outward, elbows jut, and shoulders shrug.
In legend, a storm strikes the village, and the drum awakens and calms the winds. Now, on stage, just as it did a thousand years ago in Africa, when trouble arises, Mama Tambu starts to murmur in the night. The music softens as Kofi stands atop the drum while the villagers kneel and sway around it in a circle, their bodies sway, and their arms intertwine or are held aloft in unison. Kofi reaches down to touch the tops of the villagers’ fingertips and then raises his arms in grand sweeping arcs towards the sky.
When the villagers rise, it’s in wild celebration. Kofi, as he sweeps his arms up and down with his poncho trailing, looks like he might take flight. The villagers roll their shoulders, jutting their heads forward repeatedly in birdlike moves. Chief Kofi and the drum vanish. The villagers circle, lifting the edges of their ruffled skirts and sweeping them one way while their bodies step in the opposite. The circle opens into lines. They bow forward and back, whipping their heads. Their raised skirts lead every move. They re-form a semi-circle around Kofi, shrugging and stomping. He moves quickly among them, his arms outstretched and then raised. He whips the edge of his poncho, and shakes his head, stepping side to side, his feet kicking. He begins rolling his shoulders in huge circles then tightens and spins them faster and faster, staring at the viewers dead on. With a final triumphant shout from their Chief the villagers retreat from the stage, having survived the night and implying that perhaps we all just might make it through our hardships if we keep moving.
Candela en mi Corazón, Batey Tambó
Artistic Direction and Choreography: Julia C Cepeda, Denise Solis
A woman clad in a white shift walks forth from the darkness clanging a cowbell. She circles once, then lifts her arms to the spotlight, and begins to incant.
The clanging bell summons forth a woman dressed in an elegant red silk gown, who carries her head high, chin up, like royalty. She is Julia Cepeda, choreographer and 8th generation Bomba dancer. She has carried the knowledge of this tradition for the last forty-five years.
The two women circle each other. The cowbell-player retreats to the line of five singers that line the backstage, cornered with five drummers who line the side stage.
The woman in red is joined by a swath of “ladies-in-waiting” all in white gowns. They’ve tucked swords painted the colors of the Puerto Rican flag into their belts, a symbol of their resistance to the colonialism – past and present – that has dominated their island. They move in and out of a circle formation, brandishing their swords and touching them at the circle’s center. They turn to face outwards defiantly, the swords across their chests, as they snap their heads to the left and right repeatedly.
Bomba is an ancient dance of resistance that is traditionally improvised. Here as choreographer, Julia has chosen to set the central sequence of the piece, but in the latter half, each lady in white has a solo interaction, a unique Bomba dance, that she performs in concert with the drums. Each woman steps closer to the drumming line for her solo. As with all Bomba, it is an improvised conversation, and the dancer directs the music with her body. For generations, these improvised dances have been witnessed only in the privacy of people’s homes, for Bomba was forbidden in public. These are sacred and intimate dances that are not necessarily made for the stage. Yet here they are a gorgeous rebellion.
Onstage, Julia, as the lady in red, beckons forth her lead drummer, Denise Solis (Dee). Drumming in Bomba is traditionally reserved for men, Dee is one of the first women to perform as a lead drummer.
Dee bows deeply and approaches Julia in a crouch, then straddles her drum as it lies on its side, watching every move that Julia makes. Julia leads the rapid beat with her right shoulder, then her elbow, then her feet, then her head, then both shoulders. She flares her skirts and directs with her gown, her every move fierce and defiant. They build and build the dance together, the intensity and intimacy of their rebellion growing. Until Julia drops her skirt, the dancer and the drummer bow deeply to each other, and embrace.
Nuevo Camino, Batuki
Artistic Direction, Choreography: Daniela García-Piedra, Diana Aburto Vega, and Pedro Gomez
In the show’s finale, we find ourselves in a neighborhood park in San Francisco where kids, big sisters, babysitters and young mothers play. They are joined by four young men with large drums. They grip hands in greeting and prepare to play. The stage becomes a bright summery afternoon. A small girl with pigtails drops into a split while the big sisters chase the little ones in a game of tag.
Suddenly a woman in narrow sunglasses and a visor with yellow caution wrapped around her pant legs appears on the playground, causing trouble. She begins to fight with the other women, distinctly saying: “You don’t belong here. You can’t be here.” Artistic director and drummer, Pedro Gomez, based this on a real-life encounter with a man who attempted to silence the group’s drumming in a public space earlier this year. As his co-director, Daniela García-Piedra, who played the play-ground aggressor, said later, “They want to silence the drums, even the drums within us.”
The visor-lady is eventually driven away by a big sister.
The kids and the young women vanish, and the drummers take the stage beating and swaying in unison. Their music is an original composition, a mix of Afro-Cuban, Afro Brazilian, and Latin beats. Behind them, an entire band lines the upstage: singers, an electric guitar, and more drums.
A woman in lascivious, devil-red costume takes the stage, flicking a feather whip. The tempo slows and the drummers raise their sticks in long arcs overhead. The devilish woman is joined by a small troop of young women in white. They perform in unison, their arms moving in long curves and waves, repeating three steps side-to-side, while accenting the movement with their hips. Two teenage dancers move amongst them in green, leaf print.
When the troop of women vanish, the drummers move downstage and become the dance, again raising their arms overhead between strikes and swaying, one even lifting his drum over his head. Two toss their sticks across the room to each other and catch them. The beat quickens and the two teenagers in leaf-print are joined by two others and a young female drummer. They flex their palms and feet, circling their arms and turning slow circles in repeated, high-kneed steps with the beat. Their dance ends in a rap by the young woman who defeated the playground “Karen.” The music turns harsh with the screech of electric guitars and the two kids in leaf-print grab their heads and roll their bodies and torsos as if the music is hurting them.
We find ourselves back on the playground with the entire company, the full band is playing, the electric guitars blare as the “Karen” reappears. The big sisters and kids return, carrying signs. “They tried to bury us, but we are seeds!” and “No One is Free Until We Are All Free.” The aggressor retreats into the audience while the young dancers and drummers take over the stage, drumming and dancing in joy until the audience joins in.
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