Bolefuego - artists Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Daniella Barbarito - shared loud and clear at Sable’s Food & Art Fridays Performance Arts Series on June 305h, 2023.

loud and clear
Choreography and performance by Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Daniella Barbarito
Music by Daniella Barbarito
Costume design by Lexy Ho-Tai
Scenic design by Xinan Ran.

loud and clear is a performance piece exploring diasporic imagination and future folklore. What happens when folklore migrates? How do we celebrate resilience within the exhausting process of migrating? The work imagines a hybrid fictional and post-nationalist folkloric festivity inspired by immigrants and the vibrancy of Latin-American traditions such as tambores, calypso, the dancing devil of Yare, Naiguatá, and the Andean ekeko.

Artist Bios:

Miguel Alejandro Castillo is a queer interdisciplinary artist from Caracas, Venezuela. A choreographer, director, installation artist, educator, and performer, he is drawn to the permeability of art forms and the new inquiries that arise from cross-disciplinary and multicultural collaborations. His current research investigates diasporic imagination and future folklore. Through this work, he wields imagination both to discover what is true and to expand the realm of what is possible.

Castillo is a Fresh Tracks artist in residency at New York Live Arts and the choreographer for Prisoner of The State, a new opera by David Lang commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. As a dancer, Miguel has performed in the U.S and internationally in the works of Faye Driscoll, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Jeanine Durning,

Maria Hassabi, Tzveta Kassabova, Alex Springer & Xan Burley, Peter Schmitz, Laurel Jenkins, Delfos Danza Contemporánea, among others. In 2021 Castillo was a danceWEB scholar at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna. He is also a company member of Agile Rascal Bicycle Touring Theatre.

Castillo is a proud United World College alumnus, holds a bachelor’s in dance and theatre from Middlebury College and an M.F.A in Choreography and Performance from Smith College.

Daniella Barbarito is multi-disciplinary artist who was born and raised in Caracas and currently lives in Madrid. Her music reimagines Venezuelan tradition with a modern approach and deals with memory and identity with a humor, pathos and nostalgia that borrows from the bolero cannon. She accompanies herself on the Venezuelan cuatro, adding a touch of folklore to her post-modern sensibility.

Photos by Jay Stonefield