Archive:

Ignacio Sotolongo and Lucia de Santiago, choreographer and dancer, create with me a short about love and loss.

This video goes behind the scenes, a youth orchestra teams up with a student dance company to create a version of Peter and the Wolf. In these videos for the TV series Pasion por las Artes, I am finding it is much more interesting to take a look at the process rather than just document a performance or a gallery show. Interestingly, and coincidentally, the two maestros here come from the same school of the arts in Havana, Cuba, where for the time of their education, roughly the 1970´s and 1980´s, some of the best worldwide performing artists trained.

This new series will teach you how to mambo, to salsa and to cha-cha-cha with the Super Maestro Ignacio Sotolongo of Zacatecas, Mexico. Each episode will feature new steps and practice in the studio with our variety of ages and shapes and sizes of great dancers. Then we go out to the streets and beautiful plazas and Nacho will lead us in merengue, rumba and danzon with the public.

Cuban born choreographer and dancer Ignacio Sotolongo Rosell develops and presents CARMEN, a ballet with young dancers in the group Danzaria of University Autonoma de Zacatecas.  The ballet is presented in the 1891 Teatro Calderon, a centerpiece of Zacatecas architectural treasures.

Maya got her initial training with Ignacio Sotolongo of Zacatecas, Mexico and spends summers here in Zacacatecas. She describes her experience as a first year dance student in Cuba, heading back there soon.