Last October the National Festival of Contemporary Dance Downtown ‘Raúl Flores Canelo’ reached its 20th edition with the presentation of dance proposals from Coahuila and Veracruz, as well as a retrospective photographic exhibition of his career.
However, with this meeting he also closed a cycle and the Rhodes Cultural Association, organizer of the event, gave to know that it would be paused to redesign it and better meet the objectives it sets.
“When we return with the festival, it will not return in the same way or with the same objectives. We are going to leave some things very specific, we are going to continue being a festival for the promotion of regional, national, international companies, but we are going to look for other promotion mechanisms”, the president of VANGUARDIA commented in an interview RhodesLuis Javier Alvarado.
“[Los festivales] They are formats that are in crisis, that in many ways have run out. Many festivals in the country have closed their activities because they are reorganizing. It seems fast, but it’s not, it’s been like five years since various festivals have taken a break for exactly the same thing”, he added.
Alvarado pointed out that this decision was already being forged since before the pandemic, but with its arrivalda and the crisis it represented for culture in general, It became clear that it was necessary to put everything on hold in order to redesign the proposal.
In this sense, he made it clear that they do not seek to resort to solutions such as migration to digital platforms —another product of the pandemic—, if not being able to find a strategy that meets its objectives of disseminating contemporary dance in Coahuila.
“What we want is to find a suitable format for capacity, receptive spaces. Smaller theatres, smaller forums and more circulation. Because the reality for contemporary dance, the one we see, is that in Saltillo it is very difficult to open spaces as wide as the Teatro de la Ciudad, which is very cool, but the answer is very relative, it is not always optimal, and this It has to do with the fact that we do not have the enormous apparatus for promotion and dissemination, to make gigantic calls”, he explained.
As one of the possibilities that they are exploring, mentionor mobility and access to alternative spaces. He gave as an example the company Mar Gómez from Spain, with which they collaborate regularly, which has a small headquarters, with a capacity of no more than 50 people, but with “extraordinary mobility”, which allows them to publicize their work with greater ease.
We are going to leave some things very specific, we are going to continue being a festival for the promotion of regional, national, and international companies, but we are going to look for other promotion mechanisms”.
Luis Javier Alvarado, president of RODAS
“Sometimes the artistic programming is subordinated to the concept or idea, and I believe that this cannot happen. Nothing can pass over artistic programming. Even if it’s one or two dance companies, that must be the most important thing. And not the discussion, the conversation, which should be called, but what matters to us ands bring artistic works closer to people and that people have their personal experience and not condition them, not bias them, not induce them to take some kind of game on one concept or another”, he pointed out about another problem that they have observed in current festivals.
“We want to survive as an independent festival. And if we don’t have a support, that we should have, Institutions should understand that it is their job to support the efforts of citizens to generate cultural processes. But we, like many artists, intend to prevail like this and for that, a lot of reflection and a lot of observation are required ”, he declared.
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However, they also recognize that in Saltillo in particular, more training is needed and dissemination of contemporary dance, which generates not only new artists, but also more public interested in this discipline.
Meanwhile, the activities of the Rhodes Cultural Association They will continue and now that they have obtained the support of the national call México en Escena – Artistic Groups, they are already preparing a great billboard for 2023
