The El Paso Museum of
Archaeology Presents
Exploring
the Music of the Americas
A
Family Workshop by the musical group Ceiba
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.
