While we are Renaissance men and women, we aren't experts on absolutely everything. So we took up with friend of the Festivals (and our former communications manager) Ellery Biddle, who is in fact an expert on Cuban arts and media. We thought she'd be great person to give us some context on Marianela Boán's 2010 Live Arts Festival production Decadere. Ellery tells us what the Cuban art scene is, and isn't, and talks to Marianela Boán about how social critique plays out in her show.

In Cuba, a professional dance or theater performance is cheaper than a can of soda. Alongside its renowned literacy and education programs, the Cuban government has built an intricate system to support the nation's artists and to "culture" the Cuban public. Tickets to music, dance, and theater performances cost only a few pesos more than a movie, and opportunities to see art abound. Cubans consume art with about as much voracity as Americans do college basketball—they know the names and backgrounds of the performers, they understand the history and context of the work, and they avidly discuss the choices of the artists and the nuances of their execution.

Marianela Boán reminded me of this in our recent conversation about Decadere, her new work that will make its U.S. premiere at the 2010 Live Arts Festival. I've traveled to Cuba multiple times as a student and as a researcher, and what I mention above is not a part of Cuban life that outsiders know much about—censorship is by far the more common subject in the popular imagination when it comes to creative expression in Cuba.

After the jump: government and culture, fast food, and surveillance.

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"I'm more interested in performing than choreographing," says Bethany Formica, who will be dancing in Marianela Boán's new piece for the Live Arts Festival, Decadere. "I ended up choreographing because otherwise you have no ownership over your work. It's a struggle of wanting to be known for that, but I have to force myself to choreograph."

Bethany is not unknown for her choreography; after all, she received a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts choreography fellowship in 2008. But she is better known for her performances in some of the region's best-received dance performances of recent years, such as Nichole Canuso's Wandering Alice and Teatr Dada von Bzdülöw's Faktor T (to which she also contributed choreography).

For her work in Faktor T, she and the Teatr Dada von Bzdülöw went back and forth from Poland over the course of a year while they rehearsed.

"It was a difficult process," Bethany says. "It was a small company with huge egos, and we'd be sitting in dark theaters for twelve hours smoking cigarettes and doing nothing."

Still, Bethany says the international opportunities she's had in Philadelphia have been remarkable, citing Dance Advance in particular as an organization that promotes international exchanges.

Only recently did she return from the Dominican Republic and Colombia, where she performed with Marianela Boán. In Decadere, Bethany says the cultural interactions between Marianela and the dancers create challenges, but rewarding ones.

"There are so many things Marianela doesn't explain. It's a mix of cultures, two languages in the rehearsal room all the time. The Colombians and Scott [McPheeters] and I had worked together as pairs before, and as a quartet, we have to figure out how to mix. Marianela pokes fun at the culture she's living in. Now that she's in the U.S., she's focusing on what we're doing wrong."

Bethany looks forward to seeing the cultural mix in action in the United States.

"We only performed Decadere in the Dominican Republic in front of Spanish-speaking audiences. There were jokes [in Spanish] that I didn't get. We're definitely exploited as the gringos in the piece. Whether that's amusing here, I don't know."

After the jump: dark humor, collaboration, and "the best most horrible thing that ever happened to me."

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This morning I woke up with sore muscles. That's because yesterday afternoon I spent an hour and a half making ajiaco with Marianela Boán.

Ajiaco is a traditional Cuban stew, but those of us who came to the Live Arts Studio yesterday afternoon weren't there to eat. Boán, the Cuban-born choreographer whose new dance Decadere will be performed at the Live Arts Festival, led a free dance improvisation workshop for dancers and non-dancers ages 18-25.

I took tap lessons for nine sequin-spangled years of my childhood and was on the dance team in middle school--I coveted the monogrammed team sweatshirt--but I've never done any kind of dance that doesn't involve A LOT of smiling and a bouquet from mom after the recital. So when I heard the words "dance improvisation" I got a picture in my head of myself, alone on stage . . . peeing my pants.

But when the tiny-but-punchy Boán began to lead the nine dancers and non-dancers in a series of movement exercises, my perceived need for a diaper vanished. At first, all we did was walk around in a circle--how could I mess that up? Then Boán layered more elements onto our basic movements, like linking arms to follow other dancers and then spinning off to join another group. We were soon moving freely throughout the space, feeling something like interlocking strains of bacteria, or as one participant described it, "like animals in a chase, ducking through the jungle."

Throughout the workshop, we added facial expressions and vocalizations to our dance that would have had my tap teacher in a fit. By the end, I felt silly for worrying about the "all eyes on me" effect. Boán emphasized listening to the group rather than inserting out own will into our improvised movements, and in this way what could have been individual and chaotic transformed into a cohesive dance that someone watching from the sideline said almost put her into a trance. That's where the ajiaco that Boán compared our dancing to came in--somehow all of our flavors blended together to make one remarkable, albeit sweaty, stew. Yum.

--Ellen Freeman

Photos by Sudi Green, ajiaco image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.