A La Música is a flamenco dance performance premiering February 13th and 14th, 2023, at UTRGV. This unique event bringing dancers and musicians from Spain and México is organized by Ballet Español Director Sonia Chapa Gomez and Katherine Moore McAllen, Director of the Center for Latin American Arts (CLAA) at UTRGV. Professional flamenco dancers Daniel Caballero Pérez and Nerea Carrasco are visiting South Texas from Madrid, Spain, where they perform at famous flamenco tapas venues, or tablaos, and at theatres with other renowned flamenco artists and live musicians. UTRGV Performing Arts Complex 02/14/23 UTRGV Photo by David Pike
By Edgar Garcia
UTRGV’s annual FESTIBA event returned this week for it’s 17th year with the goal to promote literacy and cultural arts at UTRGV and in the area.
Created in 2006, the festival hosts a variety of exhibits and experiences, from authors giving presentations, art exhibits, workshops, and musical/dancing performances to name just a few. The guest also range from world class pianists to local talent with their first exhibits.
Assistant Vice President for Public Arts and Special Projects Dahlia Guerra created FESTIBA in 2006 originally as a showcase of only musical events but has since expanded beyond its original intention. She spoke on the festival’s goals.
“So It’s a week-long festival where we showcase our faculty research, our student talent, and we engage our community in a variety of different events. The goal is to promote literacy, especially childhood literacy.”
FESTIBA also offers a variety of events for writing such as learning from authors and getting examples of work from poet laureates to learning from other students on topics from poetry, to music, and to ecology writing. Graduate Assistant Jaime Villaneuva attended one of the zoom presentations that FESTIBA hosted on Eco Writing and explained how it affected him.
“It was nice to hear a bunch of students that I’ve never heard before on the undergraduate creative writing program and those students wrote very beautifully on different things,” said Villanueva. “You get the science behind everything y’know and you could read about articles after articles but it’s nice to hear short stories about human’s dealing with climate change”.
While FESTIBA is mostly held at UTRGV, it also does outreach into the surrounding area. Professor and Chair of the Department of Creative writing at UTRGV, Emmy Perez is heavily involved in setting up the writing department’s contribution to FESTIBA. She was impressed by the outreach the festival can accomplish.
“One thing that I really admire about FESTIBA is the reading rockstar program. The program brings visiting writers to local schools and distributes free copies of the authors books to the youth,” said Perez. “I know that FESTIBA has a really big community component so it’s not only for our students for our campus but it’s really reaching into the students and the community and handing out free books and giving the youth and opportunity to hear from local and visiting writers”
While the events have passed, FESTIBA will return next year for its next week-long festival. For more information please contact Dr. Dahlia Guerra for tips on how to be involved or experience the events in full next year.
