Ceiba this Saturday at Museum of Archaeology

The El Paso Museum of Archaeology Presents

Exploring the Music of the Americas

A Family Workshop by the musical group Ceiba

Saturday, June 16, 2012, 2:00 to 4:00 pm, Free Admission
Map

Ceiba performing at the El Paso Museum of Archaeology, 2010

Families with children age six years and up are invited to participate in a creative, interactive exploration of live music and art inspired by ancient and modern Latin America from México to the Andes led by the El Paso musical group Ceiba. Both English and Spanish will be spoken during this workshop. Please call to register at 915-755-4332.  This workshop is sponsored by the City of El Paso Museums and Cultural Affairs Department and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Ceiba (world-tree) workshops are performance-demonstrations of Latin American regional music, including Mexican, Caribbean, and Andean.  Hosts may elect simpler assembly format, but a full workshop involves participants in music-making, movement/dance, and small-group verbal/visual responses to specific musical selections.  After each of several representative pieces, Ceiba’s facilitators listen to and transcribe participants’ responses to open-ended questions in small groups (What did you see?  Where did you travel?  What did you hear?  How did you feel?).  Questions rotate after each selection, so that participants may reflect upon and respond to each one.  Ceiba shares-out participants’ imagined, remembered, or sensory experiences, then continues with another selection.  Participants may transform verbal into visual images, taking home their papers or “tiling” them into a mosaic/mural. The performance is a voyage through the continent over time, branching from plural-origin roots rhythms and instruments, through pre-Columbian, colonial, and post-colonial First Nations, African, European, and other cultural traditions, into an aural canopy that sustains memory and vision today.  The workshop is adaptable to age-specific, special needs, &/or bilingual formats.  We want participants to tap the grounding, sheltering, nurturing, and world-extending potential of their own and others’ cultural “world trees.”

Ceiba formed in 1999 at La Peña del Pueblo, a workers’ cultural project at La Mujer Obrera in El Paso (now Centro Mayapán), with the purpose of reclaiming and disseminating the musical genres of Latin American folk, neo-folk, and New Song marginalized by the commercial music industry.  The cultural, historical, and artistic value of this music and the poetry of its lyrics encourage us to explore a vast and rich human geography formed by the confluence and conflict of Indigenous, European, African, and Semitic traditions.  The Americas have as many cultures and struggles as the macaw has colors.  Ceiba interprets corridos, sones, huaynos, pirecuas, cumbias, guajiras, joropos, polkas, sayas, takiraris, danzas, waylas, albazos, and yarabis from lands whose people may yet find peace with justice.  Ceiba’s core musicians are Jena Camp, Raúl García, Justino Aburto Huerta and Lorenzo Guel-Camp, son of Ceiba’s founder and musical director, Lorenzo Guel, who died in 2009.  Norma Orozco and others sometimes enliven the music by dancing the zapateado on the tarima.