Ballet Hispánico returns to the Center for the Arts concert hall at George Mason University this Saturday. Their performance includes three works that celebrate art and culture. The Saturday evening performance caps off a week of the company’s Artist-in-Residence activities.
The first piece of the night, Sombrerísimo by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, reimagines the surrealist landscapes created by Belgian artist René Magritte. Eduardo Vilaro’s Buscando a Juan looks at an enslaved artist in Diego Velasquez’s Spanish studio, Juan de Pareja. The final work by Pedro Ruiz, Club Havana, focuses on the music and dancing of Cuban culture, including well-known forms like the conga, rumba, mambo, and cha-cha chá.
Vilaro, the artistic director & CEO of Ballet Hispánico, discussed his portion of the program and the history of Ballet Hispánico. He first encountered the art of Juan de Pareja at the Prado Museum in Madrid.
“In my work, Buscando a Juan, it is really about elevating this idea of the perseverance of an enslaved person to become a major artist that people don’t know, but people in Spain do know because he was a prolific artist,” shared Vilaro. “He was Afro-Hispanic and still in the research I did there is no information whether he was Moorish or whether he was a slave brought from Africa that intermarried. So there was such an intrigue around the mystery of who he was.”…