A person in colorful clothing performs a dynamic dance move in front of a vividly projected background.
CubaCaribe, Alayo Dance Company Photo by LexMexPhotography

The CubaCaribe Festival of Dance & Music, an essential showcase of diaspora Caribbean culture, has always found a home in the Mission. Over the past two decades, the event has taken place at Brava, ODC and Z Space. This year, the 18th annual edition, “Acts of Resistance, Acts of Joy,” returns to Dance Mission Theater June 7-9 and moves to ODC Theater June 14-16 with a far-flung program curated by Alayo Dance Company founder and choreographer Ramón Ramos Alayo. 

“The festival started in the Mission and continues to be in the Mission,” said Jamaica Itule, CubaCaribe’s executive director and co-founder. “We’ve definitely reached out and done East Bay weekends using other theaters like at Laney College and the Malonga Casquelourd Center, but we keep coming back here. It’s such a cultural hub for these artists, who almost all teach at either Dance Mission and ODC, or both.”

While the festival includes master classes and dance parties, the lessons taking place on stage at CubaCaribe speak to the deep cultural currents flowing through kindred traditions and styles. With seven Bay Area dance companies presenting original choreography rooted in the Caribbean and its various manifestations across the African diaspora, CubaCaribe embodies the ongoing evolution of these cultural practices.

The first weekend’s roster includes Yamulee Project San Francisco, Folklo Ayisyen Lakay, Agua Doce Dance, Rueda Con Ritmo, Los Lupeños de San José, Cunamacue, Herencia Guantanamera, Marco Palomino and Fredrika Keefer, and Grupo Experimental Nago, “a really mixed and robust program,” Itule said. “They’re very different groups, with a mix of emerging and established artists.” 

The second weekend is far more focused, with a double bill at ODC featuring Alayo Dance Company and ABADÁ-Capoeira Performance Company. It’s a bit of departure, as Alayo often presents his company on its own, but “they’re both exploring similar themes,” Itule said. “And of course, Brazil and Cuba share so much history, including the significance of Carnaval. Ramon mixes with folkloric and modern dance, which is how he was trained, using live conga music from Santiago, where he’s from.”

If the dance companies participating in CubaCaribe represent the resilience of the rhythms, movements and cadences brought from West and Central Africa to the New World, the festival’s return to its past glory speaks to the slow recovery of the Bay Area dance scene after the first years of the pandemic. Last year, CubaCaribe returned to a two-weekend program, but putting on a theatrical event has changed markedly “from a production standpoint,” Itule said. “Staffing the tech and theater side has been so much more challenging. So many people left the city or Bay Area. Artists have had to change how they work.”

Hot Club at the Red Poppy

Paul Mehling doesn’t deserve sole credit for launching the Hot Club movement in North America in the early 1990s, but the guitarist and founder of the Hot Club of San Francisco has been at the forefront in the ongoing revival and expansion of the sound created by Manouche guitarist Django Reinhardt and French violinist Stéphane Grappelli in mid-1930s Paris.

Mehling can usually be found playing elegantly swinging lines with the HCSF or one of its smaller spinoffs, but Saturday at the Red Poppy Art House he joins forces with Oakland guitarist Jimmy Grant, a fellow Djangophile. Where Mehling has extended the Hot Club concept in new directions, interpreting the songs of Lennon and McCartney and turning his quintet into a proving ground for new compositions, Grant has honed a guitar approach that references bluegrass, Celtic and Russian folk music. Their duo encounter promises guitar pyrotechnics. Strings will be broken. 

Music series at Medicine for Nightmares

An all-star quartet bringing together four epic Bay Area improvisers assembles next Friday, June 14 when multi-reed player David Boyce’s ongoing Other Dimensions In Sound series at Medicine For Nightmares features trumpeter Darren Johnston, saxophonist Larry Ochs, bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, and cellist Ben Davis.

This brass-meets-strings configuration is built on deep ties and many previous collaborations between Ochs, a patriarch of the Bay Area new music scene and founding member of the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Johnston and Mezzacappa (a creative force responsible for a variety of multimedia situations over the years). The London-reared Davis is the wild card, bringing a gorgeous tone and supple lyricism to the proceedings.

Other events on our calendar:

Thursday, June 6

Friday, June 7

Saturday, June 8

Sunday, January 9

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