It is almost a tradition to recount what happened in matters of art and culture at the end of the year. That list is getting bigger and bigger, with new proposals by artists, collectives and institutions, con varied themes and aimed at all types of public in Saltillo.
But, although the exercise of remembering each and every one of the activities thate realized this 2022 has its benefits, It is no longer enough to list the events, which is why on this occasion we bring you a reading about the cultural panorama of these last twelve months.
NEW SCENARIOS
It was undoubtedly a great year for regional theater, especially in terms of platforms and spaces for the dissemination of this discipline. Almost at the beginning of this period, in March, the Municipal Institute of Culture from Saltillo held the first “Bertha Leticia Villalobos Delgado” Municipal Theater Festival, which brought together dozens of local companies with recent productions that showed the city public the great amount of activity that there is.
Almost at the end, in November, the INBAL National Theater Coordination, in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, brought the 42nd National Theater Show to Torreón, which offered us a “landscape of the theatricalities of Mexico” and in which 4 Coahuila projects participated —“Celsa” by En El Surco Teatro, “Tsunami” by Compañía de Teatro Camaleón, “ A monster comes to see me” by Cuarta Pared Teatro and the project “Las líneas de mi vida” by María del Roble Cerecero.
To these were added the State Theater Show, que survived the pandemic, the Saltillense Playwriting Festival and the National Playwriting Award “Teatro Testigo de la Vida”, not to mention that the playwright from Coahuila Ignacio Garibaldy López received the Fine Arts Award for Theater Play for Girls, Boys and Young People Pearl Szuchmacher 2022.
MUSIC IN SEARCH OF VISIBILITY
In addition to the successes achieved by the Desert Philharmonic Orchestra, first in May with the interpretation of Symphony no. 1 Mahler’s “Titan” and then in November with Symphony no. 9 of Beethoven, it is also important to highlight that this was the year that saw the birth of the Saltillo Opera Company, under the musical direction of Alejandro Reyes-Valdés and that made its quality clear with the presentation of Mozart’s Requiem in the Cathedral Saltillo in April.
However, something that caught a lot of attention it was the mobility of the musicians, especially the small ensembles, who sought new spaces to publicize their work. Sala Prisma was one of these and throughout the year they hosted the pianist and composer Alonso Julián, the trio of pianists Ricardo Esparza, Caro Estrada and Octavio Reyes, the flamenco show “Esto no es cosa” with the bailaora Melissa Soto and the guitarist Rodrigo Alvarado, the recital “Fantasia y realidad” by Manuel Muñoz, Carlos Montoya Trío and the Jazz 314 ensemble.
In addition to this, jazz musicians also demonstrated that this genre is increasingly to the taste of the public with the first Festival for International Jazz Day, which filled the streets of the Historic Center with musical proposals from different groups, including the Saltillo Big Band, and who promises to return with everything next year.
THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF VISUAL ARTS
The concerns of visual artists are always very varied. Although they have references and sometimes share ideas or themes, in general, maybe because it’s a solitary practicethey usually pose different things from each other.
For this reason, although this year we saw proposals dedicated to the exploration of the territory, all of them are handled in a singular way in their approach. Karla Rangel, for example, presented in September at The Pig of Babel the series “The joy of walking”, where mainly through graphics, he shares his journeys and discoveries in the territory of General Cepeda; Carlos Farías, for his part, takes the landscape and uses it as a pretext to recreate atmospheres, learn about the pictorial possibilities and the textures of the materials and even ventures into the field of abstraction in that same impetus and at the same time we have the Laguna Perla Mata Torres, who in October shared, in the gallery “María Alicia García Narro” of Casa La Besana, a perspective on the orography of Laguna while proposing a questioning about the industry of that region.
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But not only the arts of the present have something to say, which is why the Vito Alessio Robles Cultural Center exhibited four pictorial retrospectives in its space. In March “Woman, symbols and keys” by Fernando Fuentes Cortés, “The carts of Tlaxcala in Saltillo” by Guillermo López Gómez, “Bitácora de juicios” by Eloy Cerecero and what could be the most important this year “Dora Scaccioni, an Italian painter in Saltillo”, which rescued the work of this Italian-Mexican artist whose legacy was overshadowed for decades because she was the wife of Rubén Herrera.
